r/technology • u/N2929 • 12h ago
Software Steam for Linux finally goes 64-bit
https://videocardz.com/newz/steam-for-linux-finally-goes-64-bit91
u/ChimairaSpawn 11h ago
Damn, now I can’t use my Ubuntu 14 32 bit gaming machine anymore. I needed that specifically for an old Radeon HD card that doesn’t support Vulcan or GCN.
I’m probably the only person in the world that this affects. I’ll cope.
53
u/istrebitjel 10h ago
I think you'll be fine for quite a while
Valve has not confirmed when these changes will reach the stable Linux release. Until then, users on the regular Steam client will continue using the existing architecture.
6
u/iLrkRddrt 10h ago
…what processor and GPU are you using?
11
u/ChimairaSpawn 9h ago
i7-3720QM and an AMD Radeon HD 7570M… it’s an HP EliteBook 8570p
It’s a great laptop from 2012 that I still use to play old games when I have time.
18
u/iLrkRddrt 9h ago edited 8h ago
You could be able to use 64-bit just fine. According to arch wiki for example, newer kernels have NATIVE support for your GPU Vulkan and all: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU
For the code names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_7000_series
EDIT: specifically your card is in the HD 7500m family, code name: London.
10
u/FyiIAmA5py 7h ago edited 7h ago
Nope, I have been down this damned rabbit hole with my HP 8470p... AMDGPU only supports "southern island" and newer, 7570M is one gen too old (northern island).
And frustratingly far as I can tell the open source ATI drivers for whatever reason has no support (or its very limited) for the London GPU's...
At least I don't have to deal with that mess since the WiFi crapped out and I refuse to spend any extra effort or money to fix that, so the thing now lives as an server cause LAN works fine.
1
u/pisandwich 3h ago
Nice, i had the 8470p with an i5 and some radeon chip. Build quality on that thing is a tank and the bottom removable cover is a neat design. Even had a socketed cpu.
6
2
u/HildartheDorf 6h ago
There's some kernel flags to force using the amdgpu driver instead of the radeon driver for Southern Islands (SI, HD7000 series) and Sea Islands (CIK, HD8000 series) Radeon HD cards which worked really well for an old laptop of mine when my current-at-the-time laptop died. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU#Set_module_parameters_in_kernel_command_line (not Arch specific, their wiki is just good here)
Can't help if it's older than SI though.
1
39
u/IEnjoyRadios 11h ago
Cool, I guess? What actual difference does it make?
85
u/asdf_lord 11h ago
It can use more RAM.
37
u/Ok-Eggplant-7569 10h ago
If your Steam client itself uses 2GB+ RAM in a single process, you have other issues to worry about.
26
u/Electromagnetlc 10h ago
Steam client is chromium, so it shouldn't have any issue sucking back more RAM for no reason.
1
13
-1
u/SprayArtist 11h ago
What's the upside to that?
16
u/spartan6500 11h ago
so here is an actual answer instead of you just getting downvoted: a 32-bit program can ONLY use about 4GB of memory. A 64-bit program can use much, much more. Take a look at this link for a longer discussion as to why.
An additional thing is that code libraries that the 32-program depends on also have to be 32-bit. If you have a computer that supports 32 and 64-bit programs, you need to keep copies of both 32 and 64-bit libraries, which is annoying and can cause issues with someone not having the correct version of a library if they forgot to update both versions. it’s a pain.
3
u/CjKing2k 11h ago edited 11h ago
In Linux it's only 3GB after the kernel takes its mandatory 1GB per-process virtual address space. This leaves each process only 3GB for not only its own memory, but for memory it shares with other processes and/or maps to files on disk (memory-mapping files is much more efficient than using read/write/seek operations).
A 64-bit process can map all of this space one time and hold onto it for the lifetime of the process if it wants, because the 64-bit virtual address space is orders of magnitude larger than your physical RAM. If a 32-bit process runs out of virtual address space, it will have to unload (unmap) that space before it can reuse it. That adds overhead on top of not being able to take full advantage of your physical RAM.
5
9
u/ThaLunatik 11h ago
I suspect people downvoted your question because they misunderstood the intent. I have a feeling they read it as a scoffing "well what good is that 🤷" kinda remark, when you may have been asking a genuine question due to a misreading of the person's comment you replied to.
They said "it can use more RAM", which I'm guessing might've been misinterpreted as "it'll gobble up more resources". A clearer phrasing might've been "it can access more RAM".
Plenty of people have already responded with technical explanations, but I wanted to address it from the angle of what I suspect may have been a simple misunderstanding.
6
u/SprayArtist 10h ago
I've been on reddit long enough to know that any question on here is a transaction of variable karma 😂 that's fine though, plenty of people on here that are willing to give an answer.
13
u/asdf_lord 11h ago
More things in memory can be loaded without loading from disk
2
u/AyrA_ch 9h ago
I really hope the 4GB memory limitation of 32 bit processes isn't the bottleneck for a download manager with integrated desktop icon double click abstraction system.
1
u/brett- 6h ago
If that is all you use Steam for, then yeah it's totally overkill. But Steam has a ton more features built in that could benefit here. Voice/text chat, remote play, live streaming/game recording, controller remapping, big picture mode, the in-game overlay, a whole peer-to-peer networking stack, etc.
2
u/NutsackEuphoria 2h ago
oh shit what if they're prepping to finally upgrade steam chat again so we have a good discord alternative
1
4
u/cheraphy 11h ago
Having more things loaded into ram long term ostensibly makes things faster, but that entirely depends on how many huge chunks of data need to be loaded in and can be cached, and how slow the storage medium is. Modern SSD the difference felt is going to be basically non-existent for anything you do in steam it's self (launching games and the games themselves being separate entirely.) The built in web browser opens up some possibilities for actually getting benefits out of more ram.
All of that disregarding that actually 32-bit software can access plenty more than 4GB of ram because we solved the problem of limited address space 40 years with paging.
The more important benefit, I think, comes from the fact that 32-bit software can only use the subset of machine code instructions exposed in the 32-bit instruction set. There's some major caveats and nuance to that. I'm talking about x86 architecture only, and plenty of x86 instructions have variable input data sizes. But double/quadruple pump instructions are going to be slower than one that can operate on wider data in a single go.
36
u/Ok-Eggplant-7569 11h ago
Currently, not much will change. 32 bit Linux games still depend on 32 bit libraries, so Steam itself will still need (some) them installed.
They can start reducing the amount though, which can then reduce the burden on distro maintainers, who currently maintain 64 and 32 bit versions of a lot of libraries, almost exclusively for Steam. If Steam needs less of them, they can start dropping them.
In the far future, this is also the first step for 64 bit only Steam.
It might also result in some minor (5-15%) performance increases, as 64 bit programs can use more advanced CPU instructions to get more work done faster.
13
u/IEnjoyRadios 11h ago
In other words it is nice for developers but not really something for end users to get excited about. The performance of steam itself isn’t really an issue.
2
u/burning_iceman 6h ago
On Arch the 32bit libraries haven't been officially provided for quite a while now. You have to compile them yourself or get them from questionable sources. It's definitely an improvement for end users to get rid of them.
1
u/IEnjoyRadios 3h ago
Ok sure, but that is also arch we’re talking about.
Edit: as far as I can tell you’ll still have to do that though.
3
u/OrphisFlo 10h ago
I'm wondering why they don't just provide a 32bit sysroot to run the games in instead.
5
u/Ok-Eggplant-7569 10h ago
They do, that is what the Steam Linux Runtime (SteamRT) is. The Steam Client itself also runs in SteamRT. This is why there are now less 32 but libraries required.
However there are some libraries which are specific to the system components, afaik at least the Nvidia userspace libraries are specific to the currently installed kernel driver version. Those can't be included in SteamRT.
4
u/NelsonMinar 11h ago
It means Linux distributions can finally stop installing a full 32 bit runtime just to support one game launcher. Well, it will eventually, once Valve finishes removing the obsolete 32 bit.
2
u/Mysterious-Recipe810 9h ago
I think it means dealing with pre-caching shaders won’t burn the cpu as much. Steam has had unaligned 32 bit memory operations, which this will fix. If you haven’t noticed your system using more energy (fan noise) for no apparent reason, when not playing games, then you probably won’t notice anything.
-38
u/asdf_lord 12h ago
Finally? Was anyone waiting for this?
16
-8
u/IEnjoyRadios 11h ago edited 8h ago
You’re being downvoted for being right as is typical of Reddit, but this won’t really make any difference for the end user. So yeah, it’s not a big deal.
Edit: read the article folks. This won’t really matter to you as an end user.
-6
u/Gogo202 11h ago
Every redditor thinks they are smarter than they actually are when it comes to technology. This news doesn't make any difference for 99.99% of them
1
u/IEnjoyRadios 9h ago
Yeah it’s typical Reddit. The downvote brigade just proves it. Fact of the matter is this is a change that matters for devs, not end users. The article even acknowledges this.
Edit: here’s a quote from the article that none of the people down voting have read:
“The transition may come as a surprise to Linux users who have been running 64-bit games through Steam for years. However, the architecture of the games was always independent of the Steam client itself. Some components, including Steam WebHelper, already operated as 64-bit processes…”
159
u/callmiyourbaby 11h ago
still gotta keep the 32-bit libraries installed anyways