The v0.7.2 release of LSI has many new cool fixes and features, including:

• Initial snapd support
• New Unity "black screen of nope" workaround
• New lsi-exec general-purpose binary
• Massively enhanced shim
• And loads more :) Read the changelog! :P

intercept changes:

• Support openal-soft -> openal soname rewrite
• Blacklist vendoring of mpg123, freetype, zlib
• Modify SDL vendor blacklisting/transmute rules to apply to well known names only
• Rewrite libcurl.so.3 to libcurl.so.4
• Support Fedora libbz2 soname transmute
• Rewrite libudev.so.0 to libudev.so.1
• Permit html5_app to load widevine modules for encrypted content playback
• Permit swiftshader for CPU based GL acceleration on slower cards in Steam client
• Fix vendoring rules for libstdc++.so.6 to apply to games on separate Steam Libraries (partitions) so that Black Mesa launches again.

shim changes:

It also features a new generic lsi-exec entry point. This entry point is used by the main steam (or lsi-steam) binary, and can be used to execute any given program under the LSI environment. This is useful for debugging. Future versions will add support for some GOG titles (ongoing).

• Add support for XDG specification (XDG_CONFIG_HOME, etc)
• Reworked environment bootstrap to be robust and respect existing LD_PRELOAD variables, allowing Simple Screen Recorders glinject to work.
• Export DBUS_SILENCE_WARNINGS for patched d-bus to fix message spam (only useful with this non-upstream patch or using the LSI snap)

redirect changes:

The redirect module now has a new workaround for the "Unity Black Screen Of Nope" issue. This issue is known in older Unity3D builds where the output renderer is clamped to 0x0 resolution when in fullscreen borderless mode. Many games default to this, hence the expression "black screen of nope".

To alleviate this issue, the redirect module emulates the behaviour of the -screen-fullscreen 0 CLI argument. The $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/unity3d/*/prefs file is abstracted through SHM (shm_open) and we rewrite the config on save/launch, writing an initial config if one doesn't exist.

Specifically, we change a single preference on the fly:

<pref name="Screenmanager Is Fullscreen mode" type="int">0</pref>

This means all Unity3D games using this older prefs path will default to launching as a windowed game, even if the configuration already existed with fullscreen being activated. This alleviates the issue for many games (tested with "Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes" and others) - but obviously forces these games to not know about the fullscreen setting anymore. You can enable this again in-game, and this is effectively the price to pay for general compatibility. The game authors can alleviate this by updating to the latest build of Unity3D and issuing new Linux builds. You may also turn off this option through the lsi-settings UI if you do not have any games that suffer from this common bug.

snapd support:

The new shim architecture shared by the lsi-exec and steam/lsi-steam binary entry points now has support for running within snapd, within the solus-runtime-gaming and linux-steam-integration snaps.

• Support full environment bootstrap, and construction of XDG directories
• Snap environment pivots home to $SNAP_USER_COMMON for more efficient/sane update paths
• Supports vdpau from host NVIDIA files dynamically
• Support proprietary NVIDIA drivers from host dynamically (/var/lib/snapd/lib/gl and /var/lib/snapd/lib/gl32)
• Support host (and runtime) Vulakan ICD files dynamically (/var/lib/snapd/lib/vulkan)

Upstream snapd work:

The following changes have happened upstream to allow support for LSI:

General support for biarch distros/Solus as a runtime snap:

• https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/3974
• https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/3975
• https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/3976
• https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/3977
• https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/3978
• https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/3980

LSI Specific:

• https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4182
• https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4183
• https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4197
• https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4207

Linux Steam Integration (LSI) 0.6

This is a rather large release for LSI, focusing on improving compatibility and security for gamers.

This release also features a new LD_PRELOAD based liblsi-redirect.so to help with some bugs in ARK: Survival Evolved and Project Highrise. Read down for more details!

New UI

liblsi-intercept.so

• Transmute vendored SDL libraries to host names
• Prevent games from using vendored libcurl
• Rewrite XNA/Mono dlopen() requests to use host libraries where possible
• Prevent games from using vendored openssl libraries
• Whitelist swiftshader libGLESv2.so
• Prevent games from replacing the rest of mesa libs
• Prevent games from using some common vendored GLU/GLEW libraries
• Redirect broken /Plugins/x86/ dlopen() requests to the proper directory (/Plugins/x86_64/)
• Whitelist libx264 vendoring in the Steam client
• Add new system to allow redirecting LibreSSL linking to a host library, which can be the native libSSL or an alternatively named library (i.e Solus has libssl-libressl.so). This will help to improve security for certain ports, along with the existing SSL/libcurl intercepts.
• Fix preload failures for Mono games attempting to load .dll.so files when the .dll path is the correct one (Helps with "black screen of nope" issues)

liblsi-redirect.so:

• Introduced this LD_PRELOAD based module to fix games on the fly
• Override open() system call to fix "ARK: Survival Evolved" using broken shader assets (requires TheCenter DLC)
• Override fopen64() system call to fix "Project Highrise" attempting to use a preference directory as a file and then crashing
• Introduced profile system to allow explicit + safe matching of games, with a view to extending this in future.

common:

• Lots of cleanups
• Much nicer logging system (LSI_DEBUG=1 steam)
• Introduced a VDF (Valve Data Format) file parser to support multiple Steam installation directories.
• Shared much of the code-base between the various modules.

lsi-settings changes:

• Completely revamped the UI
• Dynamically updates state based on selections
• Writes settings when closing the window, no need for extra buttons
• Uses CSD under supported desktop environments (dynamically)
• Community translations, thank you community!

Raw changelog commits.

This release is a slight refactoring to add a fallback "vendor offender" mode to liblsi-intercept. In this fallback mode, LSI will ensure that certain vendored libraries are blacklisted which ensures certain games (Like Black Mesa) will work correctly with the open source drivers.

This matters for distributions using the new C++ ABI, and games shipping the old C++ ABI as a vendored lib. This resolves the typical issue seen in Steam on open source drivers:

libGL error: unable to load driver: i965_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: i965
libGL error: unable to load driver: i965_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: i965
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

With this LSI update, you'll be able to play BLM and other games without issues.

Outside of this, 0.5 builds on the previous updates to clean up the codebase, fix the ABI symbol visibility in the intercept lib, and fix the build system to always respect -Dwith-steam-binary= to allow masking of the real Steam path even when using the co-exist shim mode.

This is a minor update to 0.4 - improving the meson and liblsi-intercept integration

• Improve documentation
• Fix meson build issues with meson_options.txt (thanks @alunux)
• Deduplicate liblsi-intercept whitelist
• Add -Dwith-new-libcxx-abi=true build option. Please use this if using GCC 6 or higher, so that fallback LD_PRELOAD is supported correctly when disabling the native runtime and using the Steam provided runtime.

This release of LSI adds a new "liblsi-intercept", which controls the dynamic linking for the Steam binaries, so that many long standing issues are now solved, such as crashes on start, broken full screen views, etc.

See the Solus G+ post for more details on this release.

This package has now switched to meson, so please read the meson_options.txt and sample .sh files to see how to build this. Note you should ship both a 32-bit and 64-bit build of the intercept library to get full functionality.

For hints on how to package this for your distribution, see the Solus package.

Always take patches after the release if possible. A new point release will be coming soon to address any issues found this week in testing of 0.4

Version 0.3 includes various changes:

• Use a submodule for libnica and drop our modified copy, simplifying maintainence
• Use latest libnica version with many cleanups/fixes
• Support latest runtime requirements by preloading libxcb on native runtime.
• Support a new --disable-replace-steam option.

By default, LSI will replace /usr/bin/steam with it's own shim. This was to enable easier integration into distributions at a root level, as seen in Solus. However, this made it inaccessible to users who currently do not have LSI available.

To address this, and to stave off the latest croppings of butcherscripts that make actual alterations to the Steam runtime, vs the passive LSI override approach, this new option will instead generate the following files:

• /usr/bin/lsi-steam
• /usr/share/applications/lsi-steam.desktop

This will ensure there is no path-conflict with existing Steam, and in turn lsi-steam will invoke /usr/bin/steam.

Users can then use the LSI Steam option in their menu to launch Steam via the LSI Shim. Those building LSI should also pass --enable-frontend if providing a package, so that users can access the LSI Settings UI - to enable control of the runtime aspects.

N.B: Ensure you use the provided .tar.xz tarball, it contains the submodule libnica. Autogenerated GitHub tarballs do not.

• Fix Arch Linux support
• Cleanup the lsi-settings UI a small bit (could do with some design-help here if anyone is interested)
• Code cleanup

Initial release of linux-steam-integration for validation within Solus

LSI is completely distro agnostic, however, and you should check the root README.rst for information on how to integrate into your solution.