Steam Deck

Here are some snippets that I did on my steam deck.

⚠️⚠️⚠️I will not be responsible for any loss or damage

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steamdeck

Prepare

  • Go to desk mode and set default password with passwd
  • Enable R+W on the current running SteamOS by steamos-readonly disable - need sudo privilege
  • Install common packages pacman -S iperf3 tmux ethtool net-tools smemstat

SSH

I like to remote control the machine by SSH sometimes, so I need to enable the ssh, and please notice that you need to disable the password login and only allow use private key to login.

  • Start ssh

    systemctl start sshd
systemctl enable sshd

# copy pub key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/your_key_ed25519 deck@deck_ip

  • Disable password login

    PasswordAuthentication no
PubkeyAuthentication yes

Journald logging

systemd-journald is a system service that collects and stores logging data, but we don’t need those data probably. So I limit the log size to 50MB, you can change the size by your own.

# the size for the log, 10 hours
(A)(root@steamdeck ~)# du -sh /var/log/journal
22M /var/log/journal

  • Change the log size

    nano /etc/systemd/journald.conf

[Journal]
#Storage=auto
#Compress=yes
#Seal=yes
#SplitMode=uid
#SyncIntervalSec=5m
#RateLimitIntervalSec=30s
#RateLimitBurst=10000
#SystemMaxUse=
SystemMaxUse=50M

  • Restart systemd-journald

    systemctl restart  systemd-journald

Swap

Reduce the usage of swap file to extend the disk lifespan. the default value is 100, I changed it to 1.

1 Minimum amount of swapping without disabling it entirely (on kernels 3.5 and new, same as 0 on older kernels).

(deck@steamdeck sysctl.d)$ cat /etc/sysctl.d/swappiness.conf
vm.swappiness=100

Spectre

From https://meltdownattack.com/

Spectre breaks the isolation between different applications. It allows an attacker to trick error-free programs, which follow best practices, into leaking their secrets

We can check the CPU by lscpu, we can see Spec store bypass/Spectre v1/Spectre v2 are mitigated. In my opinion, it’s not necessary on the steam deck, and it will drop the performance a little bit(I can’t sure how much). So I removed the patch.

Spectre

You will get about ~10% performance(benchmark by 7zip)

Donating 💸

Feel free to Buy Me a Coffee

Disabled Spectre

  • Add mitigations=off to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT

    nano /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="loglevel=3 quiet splash plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles module_blacklist=tpm amd_iommu=off amdgpu.gttsize=8128 spi_amd.speed_dev=1 audit=0 fbcon=vc:4-6 fbcon=rotate:1 mitigations=off nowatchdog nmi_watchdog=0"

  • Generate a new grub2 config file

    update-grub

  • 7zip Benchmark

    7-Zip [64] 17.04 : Copyright (c) 1999-2021 Igor Pavlov : 2017-08-28
p7zip Version 17.04 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,64 bits,8 CPUs x64)

x64
CPU Freq: - - 64000000 - - - - - -

RAM size:   14836 MB,  # CPU hardware threads:   8
RAM usage:   1765 MB,  # Benchmark threads:      8

                       Compressing  |                  Decompressing
Dict     Speed Usage    R/U Rating  |      Speed Usage    R/U Rating
         KiB/s     %   MIPS   MIPS  |      KiB/s     %   MIPS   MIPS

22:      18214   721   2458  17720  |     268427   765   2994  22896
23:      18601   741   2558  18952  |     261928   766   2959  22667
24:      17542   746   2528  18861  |     256192   772   2912  22486
25:      16701   757   2520  19069  |     250730   778   2867  22314
----------------------------------  | ------------------------------
Avr:             741   2516  18651  |              770   2933  22590
Tot:             756   2724  20621



7-Zip [64] 17.04 : Copyright (c) 1999-2021 Igor Pavlov : 2017-08-28
p7zip Version 17.04 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,64 bits,8 CPUs x64)

x64
CPU Freq: - - - - - - - - -

RAM size:   14836 MB,  # CPU hardware threads:   8
RAM usage:   1765 MB,  # Benchmark threads:      8

                       Compressing  |                  Decompressing
Dict     Speed Usage    R/U Rating  |      Speed Usage    R/U Rating
         KiB/s     %   MIPS   MIPS  |      KiB/s     %   MIPS   MIPS

22:      14703   612   2337  14304  |     227173   669   2897  19377
23:      14520   621   2381  14795  |     236744   706   2902  20487
24:      17248   737   2516  18546  |     254143   768   2904  22306
25:      16457   747   2515  18791  |     247476   770   2859  22024
----------------------------------  | ------------------------------
Avr:             679   2437  16609  |              728   2891  21049
Tot:             704   2664  18829

Snippets(REBOOT AFTER MODIFIED)

Journald log file size to 50MB

sudo steamos-readonly disable

cp /etc/systemd/journald.conf ~/Documents/
cp /etc/default/grub ~/Documents/

sudo sed -i '/SystemMaxUse/d' /etc/systemd/journald.conf
sudo echo "SystemMaxUse=50M" >> /etc/systemd/journald.conf

Swap

sudo sed -i 's/100/1/g' /etc/sysctl.d/swappiness.conf

Mitigations OFF

sudo sed -i 's/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="[^"]*/& mitigations=off/' /etc/default/grub
sudo update-grub