Yes please! +1

The Steam Link program is available for Linux through Flatpak and for Android and IOS through the app store. So you should be able to run it on most hardware. It would still be cool, though. Then we can use the Steam Link hardware for other things perhaps.

Originally posted by Shark:

The Steam Link program is available for Linux through Flatpak and for Android and IOS through the app store. So you should be able to run it on most hardware. It would still be cool, though. Then we can use the Steam Link hardware for other things perhaps.

That isn't what the OP is asking for, The OP is asking for the source for the hardware version which is actually an OS and is for what I believe is a low powered ARM based SoC of some sort.
the program you're referring to is entirely different and meant to run on an existing OS. The OP wants to be able to take that OS Source and compile it for newer hardware, maybe even something that isn't ARM based. Which would be great if somehow it was remade into something for crappy old x86 PCs that are really too low powered to be much use.

Originally posted by kitanashia:

Originally posted by Shark:

The Steam Link program is available for Linux through Flatpak and for Android and IOS through the app store. So you should be able to run it on most hardware. It would still be cool, though. Then we can use the Steam Link hardware for other things perhaps.

That isn't what the OP is asking for, The OP is asking for the source for the hardware version which is actually an OS and is for what I believe is a low powered ARM based SoC of some sort.
the program you're referring to is entirely different and meant to run on an existing OS. The OP wants to be able to take that OS Source and compile it for newer hardware, maybe even something that isn't ARM based. Which would be great if somehow it was remade into something for crappy old x86 PCs that are really too low powered to be much use.

Exactly, thank you so much for the explanation. I do wish such a nice thing can shine again even if Valve doesn’t have the resource to support it anymore. Valve please please consider releasing the source code to give the community a chance to try it out.

+1

Another +1 from me aswell

We need this!

The hardware was unique(-ish) because of the Marvell chip in it which allowed extremely efficient decoding of streaming data, but so far as I know Marvell never gave *any* licensees the source code to the drivers for that thing -- including, presumably, Valve.

(Source: I worked on a project using the same Marvell chip.)

The Steam Link "OS" is nothing unique to the Steam Link, though. It's pretty much just an *extremely* outdated Linux distribution that was stripped down to the bare minimum. And by "extremely outdated" I mean that it's running Linux 3.8.13, where the Ubuntu system I'm posting this from is running Linux kernel 6.14.0.

So this isn't just an old Linux build we're talking about; it's a *fossil*, part of the digital *geological record*.

This is presumably because of the aforementioned "so far as I know, Marvell never gave any licensees the source code for the drivers" thing, meaning you can't run a more recent Linux build on the hardware without losing support for video and audio output, as the Marvell chip handles those.

(Trust me, I've tried...)

The version of the Link app there does presumably differ from the flatpak one inasmuch as it no doubt has some code specific to the Marvell chip, but otherwise... literally, it's just booting Linux and then automatically running what is fundamentally the same app.

Realistically, performance-wise, I imagine Valve isn't interested in making a second generation of the Steam Link because the flatpak version running on Raspberry Pi 5 actually performs about as well as bespoke hardware would at this point... and it's almost assuredly a *lot* easier to support than bespoke hardware would be.

Originally posted by Packetdancer:

The hardware was unique(-ish) because of the Marvell chip in it which allowed extremely efficient decoding of streaming data, but so far as I know Marvell never gave *any* licensees the source code to the drivers for that thing -- including, presumably, Valve.


This is presumably because of the aforementioned "so far as I know, Marvell never gave any licensees the source code for the drivers" thing, meaning you can't run a more recent Linux build on the hardware without losing support for video and audio output, as the Marvell chip handles those.

(Trust me, I've tried...)

https://steamcommunity.com/app/353380/discussions/1/1488866180611415438/

@Packetdancer Have you seen this? Seems to suggest that there's some device tree issue that is preventing usage of the etnaviv graphics driver.


Edit: Ah, I see now. The reason why you can't switch to etnaviv or a newer kernel is probably h264 decode support.