Steam in systemd-nspawn container

[xtx]

Anybody use Steam in a systemd-nspawn container?

I was annoyed with how many packages were re-compiled as 32bit when I installed Steam, so I decided to try to put this in a container. I played with this for hours yesterday and it took me every second of it to finally get it to work. But I have a feeling I didn't do this correctly, and I can't find a guide anywhere of somebody doing this on gentoo. A couple things that I did (which I kind of think defeat the purpose/benefits of using a container) are installing nvidia-drivers in the container, which then required me to have a working kernel .config, so I compiled a kernel in the container as well.

Since I eventually got this to work I'll post the steps of what I did in case it helps somebody else, but I would love to hear advice as to if I did this correctly or could have saved myself some hassle. I think maybe just some extra --bind mounts or something.

1. Create ~/steamcontainer
2. Get the current stage3 amd64 tar.bz2 files and unpack them in ~/steamcontainer
3. sudo systemd-nspawn -D ~/steamcontainer --bind /usr/portage
4. Configure /etc/portage/make.conf
5. Ran emerge -uDavN @world to pull in my configured use flags and to also install systemd so that I have a working init system in the container
6. Install alsa-utils
7. Exit the container
8. On the host, emerge xhost and run "xhost +local:"
9. sudo systemd-nspawn -b -D ~/steamcontainer --bind /usr/portage --bind /dev/snd (the last bind mount is needed for alsa, that took me forever to figure out)
10. Get a working .config file for your kernel (copy it from the host machine if you want) and install your drivers (in my case nvidia-drivers)
11. run "export DISPLAY=:0"
12. Followed this guide: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Steam to create the steam set, use flags, running emerge @steam, fetching and extracting the steam installer, and running the steam installer
13. Launched steam with this script:

[xyonofcalhoun]

Following this myself, it occurs to me to be more straightfoward to use the i686 stage3 tarball than the amd64 one, so as to avoid having to have the multilib faff at all.

Did you get anywhere with the bind mount on /usr/lib32/opengl? I imagine that won't work if your host is pure64 - you'd need a multilib nvidia-driver in the host, or one in the container - or a 32-bit driver in the container, in any event.
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All questions find answers if you wait long enough.

[xyonofcalhoun]

I answered my own non-question about why you'd use the 64-bit base for this; 64-bit kernel, of course. Never mind.
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All questions find answers if you wait long enough.

[rh]

Another reason to use 64-bit is that in December update steam dropped support for 32-bit systems. At the moment everything but the steamwebhelper should still work.

You likely will sooner or later run to dbus issue with some games or home streaming.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/4444
Workaround is to run steam with

[Roman_Gruber]

I " debugged " yesterday steam.

Results:

steam client from steam overlay renames old binaries and keep them on the disc. wtf.
it is safe to remove the folder named XXXXXX.old

most stuff is downloaded with ubuntu prefix and 32bit. most stuff is 32bit

i do not belive the quote, steam is 64bit.

definitely not.

when you browse the /home/user/.local/ steam subfolder you see quite the full gtk2? gnome? 32bit ubuntu stuff with everything from /usr and such

[xyonofcalhoun]