What do you think about a "SteamBSD" machine ?

willie said:
ZioMario
do you consider your self "lazy" in this non-pejorative sense of the word?
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Maybe. I know the difference between what I can and cannot do. I’m rational. I don’t think I’m capable of pushing my limits too far, due to health reasons. So, I try to balance the effort with the pleasure and relaxation I get from having fun on my PC and creating projects.
 
To be fair google search is so bad these days it can be hard to find anything useful
and you dont get as many people blogging as in the old days

So using an AI model with search functionality can be very helpful
Its just you have to double check the commands it give you with several sources

AI models can do haywire i was just using Gemini and it started responding in a completely different language

prompt

vnd0 is busy i cant remember if i ran this command before
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resonse

vnd0 pehle thi j attach ke configure thailu chhe, etle vnconfig: VNDIOCSET: Device busy error aave chhe.

Ahiya paglaa apyala chhe:

1. vnd0 ni status tpaso
vnd0 sathe kai file jodayeli chhe te jova mate:
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NapoleonWils0n said:
To be fair google search is so bad these days it can be hard to find anything useful
and you dont get as many people blogging as in the old days

So using an AI model with search functionality can be very helpful
Its just you have to double check the commands it give you with several sources

AI models can do haywire i was just using Gemini and it started responding in a completely different language

prompt



resonse
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Gemini has been surpassed by Claude and ChatGPT in terms of accuracy and efficiency...I have the pro license due to the fact that I'm still registered as active student on the university,but I don't use it.
 
LLMs can't make stuff like this cohesively, meanwhile I can fire-up CoD anywhere :cool: (WIP FreeBSD notes)

I'd rather hand-tailor individual games to FreeBSD Wine before handing control to AIO Steam and Linuxlator. I'm kind-of wondering who would use SteamBSD?
ZioMario said:
In any case, there are already 100 games running on FreeBSD
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I haven't seen anyone (besides myself :p) who likes configuring stuff before playing the game, and Windows has full-compatibility with games, and Linux a large amount. Why be limited to about 100 of em?

FreeBSD offers control of the OS, and PC gaming (imo) is about playing games performant (high FPS, low-latency). Steam's magic is tweaked Wine (Proton), and I've gotten by fine for years with Wine Staging (Chromium patches are useful for game launchers/why Battle net client's broken on Vanilla Wine/FreeBSD's). I'd be more into having FreeBSD's Wine on-par with Linux (Staging + whatever that 32-bit Vulkan Mesa thing's about) and full-tuning OS and games :D

There's also still PCVR: How's that running on FreeBSD in a way that makes sense (low-overhead/high-perf/low-latency) before using Linux (Beat Saber was surprisingly good on a whim) or Windows with the best perf no-question? Anti-cheat's another (DJMAX V's one thing in my library only playable WIndows with XignCode3; anyone playing Valorent or BO7 is also Windows-locked)

I aim for best performance with games, and as-minimal background connections/stuff as possible. Steam's an (imo) obtusive layer easier-handled by SteamCMD. Along with Wine Staging, FreeBSD should provide a native steamcmd binary (not sure the process, but no BSD's listed on SteamCMD wiki)
 
Espionage724 said:
I aim for best performance with games, and as-minimal background connections/stuff as possible. Steam's an (imo) obtusive layer easier-handled by SteamCMD. Along with Wine Staging, FreeBSD should provide a native steamcmd binary (not sure the process, but no BSD's listed on SteamCMD wiki)
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Challenge is machine-independency. It's possible to create a menu-system that tries to cover as much as possible games in FreeBSD with a default Xorg install. Native, emulation, wine/proton, in-browser, anything that shows up in a rectangle. But preparating games to run on many different kinds of FreeBSD PC's generates so much configuration work per game that it's not realistic for 1 person or a small group.
The need for Steam is kind of walking away from the problem. They support everything, but it's a corporation that exists for profit.
 
many different kinds of FreeBSD PC's
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Steam created a customized hardware solution. So,the idea is to carefully choose the hardware components more compatible with FreeBSD and try to configure / systematically fix the errors reported by the Linuxulator to run a list of games that can run on that hardware.
 
MG said:
But preparating games to run on many different kinds of FreeBSD PC's generates so much configuration work per game that it's not realistic for 1 person or a small group.
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I think it could be done if there's passion (I've done MMOs Win/Linux/FreeBSD for a while :p)

If it's a cool game and I had more computers for bare-metal installs, I could write up notes for any game. It'd start with an initial set of commands to get it running (like GTA V, but need Staging for RGL), then be presentable like Diablo II. Desktop launcher needs tailored different DEs (mainly scripts with Terminals), but I can only ensure games work the best on what I use (Xfce X11; but if someone installed FreeBSD and gotten as far as a web browser to want to install a game, they can change xfce4-terminal to konsole/etc or do Wine graphics=wayland 😁)
 
I haven't tried NV on FreeBSD, but I've seen odd reports with AMDGPU on Linux for years. What's amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x400 do vs 0x410 or 0x10?

I'd do Xfce, X11, NVIDIA (best-case if PCVR's possible, you get better encoding tech)
 
Espionage724 said:
I haven't tried NV on FreeBSD, but I've seen odd reports with AMDGPU on Linux for years. What's amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x400 do vs 0x410 or 0x10?

I'd do Xfce, X11, NVIDIA (best-case if PCVR's possible, you get better encoding tech)
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The dcdebugmask values come straight from enum DC_DEBUG_MASK in drivers/gpu/drm/amd/include/amd_shared.h. It's a bitmask where each bit disables one Display Core feature — mostly power-saving ones you turn off to isolate a glitch:

  • 0x10 = DC_DISABLE_PSR — disables Panel Self Refresh (v1 and PSR-SU). PSR lets the panel self-refresh from a buffer on a static image to save power; on some panels it causes intermittent corruption. Disabling it raises power draw but kills the glitches.
  • 0x400 = DC_DISABLE_REPLAY — disables Panel Replay, the more aggressive successor to PSR, mainly on modern eDP panels.
  • 0x800 = DC_DISABLE_IPS — disables Idle Power Saving.

So to your actual question:

  • 0x400 disables Replay only.
  • 0x10 disables PSR only.
  • 0x410 is 0x400 | 0x10 — it disables both Replay and PSR. That's the "turn off everything panel-self-refresh-related" mask, which is what you reach for when you don't yet know which of the two is causing the corruption.

Practical order: on flaky/intermittent corruption, start with 0x10 (PSR is the usual culprit), and if that doesn't fully fix it, go to 0x410 to catch Replay as well. 0x400 on its own only makes sense once you've already pinned Replay as the cause.

Worth noting the "odd AMD reports for years" you mention are very often exactly this — PSR/Replay bugs on specific panel + DCN combinations, not amdgpu being broken in general. They're annoying but they're diagnosable one bit at a time, which is more than can be said for most display stacks.

On the NVIDIA-for-PCVR point — fair, NVENC is genuinely the better encode path and for PCVR that matters. Different tradeoff from desktop though: the thing that makes AMD painful (visible power-feature quirks) is the same openness that lets you fix them from a documented enum instead of waiting on a driver drop.
 
Espionage724 said:
I think it could be done if there's passion (I've done MMOs Win/Linux/FreeBSD for a while :p)

If it's a cool game and I had more computers for bare-metal installs, I could write up notes for any game. It'd start with an initial set of commands to get it running (like GTA V, but need Staging for RGL), then be presentable like Diablo II. Desktop launcher needs tailored different DEs (mainly scripts with Terminals), but I can only ensure games work the best on what I use (Xfce X11; but if someone installed FreeBSD and gotten as far as a web browser to want to install a game, they can change xfce4-terminal to konsole/etc or do Wine graphics=wayland 😁)
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For fun I'm trying to add some games that run from an USB image on a financial live system that I made. There must be something that stretches a game window with any resolution to borderless fullscreen. Until now it's only DOS, PS2 and 8-bit. I'm already having problems with getting it universal because things behave different on different graphics cards. A GTX1050 and Skylake i915 are different on the same monitor. Not thinking about 3d accelleration yet...
 
What do you think about the idea to carefully choose the hardware components more compatible with FreeBSD ? This will allow to create a standard and eventually better machine due the maximization of the hardware compatibility with FreeBSD,that can be used by everyone. I like this idea,more than anyone that will use his own machine. In this case,we will have more and different machines with a different level of compatibility between hardware and games and this can cause problems to the idea to create one classical SteamBSD machine produced by the FreeBSD community for the FreeBSD community.
 
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