This is an updated version of the original post Testing Mesa ACO with Flatpak
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, everyone: the Flatpak application for Steam now uses Freedesktop SDK 19.08.
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. 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.GL.mesa-aco//19.08 \
org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.mesa-aco//19.08
Then install Steam’s Flatpak app. If you are unsure on how, its page contains the instructions.
To run it, make sure Steam is not already running. Then:
FLATPAK_GL_DRIVERS=mesa-aco flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam
If you wish to make the launcher always use Mesa ACO drivers, you can set it like so:
sudo sed -i "s,Exec=,Exec=env FLATPAK_GL_DRIVERS=mesa-aco ," /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/com.valvesoftware.Steam.desktop
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.