Steam crashes when launching Proton games in a chroot

steamclosed Steam clientAudioProton

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#5823 · opened 2018-10-09 by PureTryOut · updated 2019-04-12 · 7 comments · github

PPureTryOut 2018-10-09 github

Your system information

Steam client version (build number or date): Built September 8 2018
Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): Host Gentoo Linux, chroot Ubuntu Bionic
Opted into Steam client beta?: No
Have you checked for system updates?: Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Steam crashes when trying to launch a game via Proton, according to the logs due to failing to connect to PulseAudio. However, besides the fact that native games can play audio via my hosts PulseAudio fine, Steam shouldn't even need it to run.

AL lib: (WW) alc_initconfig: Failed to initialize backend "pulse"
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1029:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
AL lib: (EE) ALCplaybackAlsa_open: Could not open playback device 'default': No such file or directory
Failed to open digital audio driver Couldn't open OAL device.
crash_20181009162315_1.dmp[1940]: Uploading dump (out-of-process)

Since this is happening in a chroot, I'm guessing it's because of missing some mounted directories from the host system, but I can't really figure out which one.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

Set up an Ubuntu Bionic chroot with Steam and PulseAudio
Launch any Proton game

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2018-10-09 github

Possibly related to #5669.

PPureTryOut 2018-10-09 github

The same symptoms, but different error. I can't test the suggestion of adding the user to the audio group though because of it running in a chroot. Also the notion of maybe running on a XFS filesystem is not the case, as it's regular ext4.

Crash dump file:
crash_20181009161404_1.zip

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2018-10-09 github

For reference, the attached minidump is a SIGSEGV in vgui2_s.so.

Hh1z1 2018-11-01 github

Any update or anything further we can provide @kisak-valve ? I remember ALSA used to be a problem but has worked for quite some time. FWIW I get this outside a chroot.

PPureTryOut 2019-01-28 github

I finally resolved this by setting PULSE_SERVER="unix/run/user/1000/pulse/native", so I guess it failed to connect to PulseAudio after all.

Rrobert-scheck 2019-04-07 github

Please note that it's actually PULSE_SERVER="unix:/run/user/1000/pulse/native" (the : missing in the previous comment is quite important), otherwise Steam just crashes without any real error message (which is the only thing Steam seems to do quite well instead of working properly).

Hh1z1 2019-04-12 github

fwiw Pulse wasn't available which is why it tried ALSA. That too failed and steam segfaulted. They still happen but I haven't hit the segfault crashing steam in at least the last few patches, guessing it was finanlly fixed too.

Nothing extracted yet.