Testing Mesa ACO with Flatpak

2-minute read
flatpak • freedesktop-sdk

The Flatpak application for Steam has been updated to use Freedesktop 19.08. The instructions here are deprecated. Please read the updated instructions in the corrected post.

Valve has been asking users to help with testing the ACO patches for Mesa. It replaces LLVM to compile shaders.

Testing a development or patched version of Mesa is not necessarily easy. So in order to help users in doing testing we are building an extension for the upcoming Freedesktop SDK 19.08. No need to build anything. Just install and define FLATPAK_GL_DRIVERS to select the patched version of Mesa.

And good news: the Flatpak application for Steam has now a beta release working with 19.08beta of Freedesktop SDK.

However we do not deliver the ACO+Mesa extension to flathub. So you will need to get it from our development release server.

So here is the procedure. First install the runtime and the mesa extensions:

flatpak remote-add --user freedesktop-sdk https://cache.sdk.freedesktop.org/freedesktop-sdk.flatpakrepo
flatpak install --user freedesktop-sdk \
    org.freedesktop.Platform//19.08beta \
    org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.mesa-aco//19.08beta \
    org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.mesa-aco//19.08beta \
    org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.default//19.08beta \
    org.freedesktop.Platform.Compat.i386//19.08beta

Then install Steam’s beta Flatpak app (it is not the beta of Steam, just the Flatpak app).

flatpak remote-add --user flathub-beta https://dl.flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install --user flathub-beta com.valvesoftware.Steam//beta

To run it, make sure Steam is not already running. Then:

FLATPAK_GL_DRIVERS=mesa-aco flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam//beta

You should see somewhere in the console the following message:

WARNING: Experimental compiler backend enabled. Here be dragons! Incorrect rendering, GPU hangs and/or resets are likely

If you see it, you are all set. And you can start testing. Remember you can set RADV_PERFTEST=llvm as environment variable to disable ACO if you want to compare.

Please follow the ACO testing instructions.

If you are using flatpak to test, please report issues to us before, either on IRC (#freedesktop-sdk on Freenode) or on our issue tracker. We can make sure the issue is not an issue on our side.