Document how people can help / contribute / support you

[koobs]

Hi @shkhln! Thanks so much for your efforts moving Steam on FreeBSD forward.

It would be great if we could document (either in the README or somewhere as obvious), specific and actionable ways that people, such as users and freebsd developers (porters, base, linux emulation committers) could contribute help move this project forward.

Ideas:

• Testing games you cant, reporting specific crashes, missing library mentions
• Additional Linuxulator support needed for known missing (game) syscalls
• Ports improvements (eg: your mention of "Steam Play can't be implemented until Ports supports multilib"). Some detail would be great here (not everyone knows what this means).
• Financial support (donations, game keys, whatever)

[shkhln]

Please note, this repo is merely a place where I dump various workarounds. Half of them are not even necessary on CURRENT. There is no way forward, it's perfectly fine as it is. All this community building stuff goes directly against my aim to spend as little time on this as possible.

Additional Linuxulator support needed for known missing (game) syscalls

I submitted a few issues concerning Linuxulator to the bug tracker. There are no missing syscalls, though. That's a bit of a meme.

Ports improvements (eg: your mention of "Steam Play can't be implemented until Ports supports multilib"). Some detail would be great here (not everyone knows what this means).

Well, multilib support is not something anyone can contribute on a whim. Mostly because it requires buy-in from existing contributors.

[netchild]

While I understand to spend as little time as possible on this, some improvements are still possible and would improve your gaming experience too.

Koop, for the readme (compared to the wiki) we can at least submit pull requests. One part would be e.g. looking into why source based games don't quit but hang. Another thing would be to have a look into what the unimplemneted ioctls are doing (or maybe this is related to the hang on exit). I had a look at the unimplemented sockopts, they are harmless, but I have a patch for the kernel to print out a better error message (e.g. "level 6 optarg 18" is related to IPSEC credentials, but if you do not use IPSEC, you shall not be concerned that the game (or rather some glue code in a lib) can't get credential infos, so I want to have the kernel print some info to this effect).

[shkhln]

I didn't mean to imply there is nothing left to do or that I don't appreciate help. What I actually mean:

1. This repository has an intentionally limited scope.
2. Most effort should go directly into Linuxulator. And some in Wine, as far as gaming is concerned.

[shuryanc]

For your information, this utility is to use what FreeBSD has to run the steam games.

In FreeBSD, we have linuxulator and wine, so as long as we can get the steam running in linuxulator and even proton to run a little bit, there's nothing more about this utility can further develop. This is because its not a port of steam but just using the existing linux call to run the steam apps. So, rather than reporting anything related to linuxulator by Alex, its better for the community to contact FreeBSD dev directly for anything in linuxulator that doesn't work.

[netchild]

The request of koop was not to push work here. It was more about documenting more things, like for example "A is not working because of X". Or "needs patch X which is in FreeBSD PR Y or FreeBSD commit rZ", or something which I have analyzed recently "if you see 'unsupported setsockopt level 6 optname 18' in dmesg/console output, you can ignore it, this is related to requesting IPSEC credential information (even if you haven't configured any IPSEC at all) and is not a reason why a game doesn't work".

[shkhln]

s/koop/koobs/ (this is genuinely confusing)

[shkhln]

Made a wiki page for you. Anything else I should do there?

[shkhln]

Ah, ok then.