SteamVR does not work under OpenSuSE Leap or Tumbleweed....

[michael.george.hart]

UDATE: 2017, April 2
You must have Nvidia 375.27.15 installed for Linux Beta SteamVr to work properly
See comments about patching the driver if you have kernel 4.10.x

======================================================================
I am going to have to face the facts; SteamVr simply does not work under OpenSuSE Leap or Tumbleweed. This is my current conclusions after about one and one half weeks of investigation of many posibilites .... Even when I Google, I did not find one person who had any success using SteamVR in any OpenSuSE distribution.

Two strange things I noticed from the logs even with direct mode enabled

Direct Mode Graphics: Unknown ()
and
Failed to find interface 'IVRVirtualDisplay_001'

I suspect that these two errors are related and one someone fixies SteamVR to make those two failures go away then SteamVR should start to work properly under OpenSuSE

[Cheeseness]

Do you kno wwhat graphics drivers you are using, and are you opted into the SteamVR beta?

[michael.george.hart]

Originally posted by Cheeseness:

Do you kno wwhat graphics drivers you are using, and are you opted into the SteamVR beta?

Nvidia 378.13 drivers ... it is the latest drivers you can get if you select GTX 1080 ti and Linux 64 ... I have tried older version of the Nvidia drivers ... none that I tried improved upon 378.13 with respect to what I was seeing in the SteamVR logs

Yes I have opted in SteamVR beta... SteamVR will not run under LINUX unless one opt into LINUX 64

[Cheeseness]

Does the 378.13 driver work with SteamVR on Linux? 375.27.15 is still the latest listed on this page[developer.nvidia.com], which is what Valve recommends (I think it might have some VR specific extensions that other driver releases don't yet have).

[michael.george.hart]

Originally posted by Cheeseness:

Does the 378.13 driver work with SteamVR on Linux? 375.27.15 is still the latest listed on this page[developer.nvidia.com], which is what Valve recommends (I think it might have some VR specific extensions that other driver releases don't yet have).

Not only does it support Vulkan Added support for the following Vulkan extensions:
VK_KHR_display VK_KHR_display_swapchain (see https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/5u0n0l/nvidia_drivers_37813_released/)

But I did see this in the article;
Updated the X driver to ignore any Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays (HMDs).
See the "AllowHMD" X configuration option in the README for details.

I am going to see what happens when I add the following line to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf device section: Option "AllowHMD" "yes"

[Cheeseness]

I'm not sure if that's relevant, but OK.

Edit:

Originally posted by michael.george.hart:

But I did see this in the article;
Updated the X driver to ignore any Virtual Reality Head Mounted Displays (HMDs).
See the "AllowHMD" X configuration option in the README for details.

Yeah, the 375.27.x drivers have that too. It's not so much related to making HMDs behave. Based on conversations I've had with Nvidia people, it was added to stop X from using a HMD as the default monitor.

[Sintakir]

I intiially also tried the latest 378.XX drivers that are available from NVIDIA. These drivers only contain the finalized and published VR-related Vulkan extensions and not those that are still unfinished, unpublished and/or in draft phase. For developers to test and implement these unofficial Vulkan extensions NVIDIA publishes the required special drivers from the 375.27.XX series. I'm 100% sure that SteamVR needs some of the extensions that only the Vulkan developer beta driver contains.
And I would expect these drivers to also work on Tumbleweed if they work on Arch (with the 4.10 kernel patch[aur.archlinux.org] that I ported for NVIDIA 375.27.15 a few hours ago).

[michael.george.hart]

Originally posted by gehneo:

I I'm 100% sure that SteamVR needs some of the extensions that only the Vulkan developer beta driver contains.
And I would expect these drivers to also work on Tumbleweed if they work on Arch (with the 4.10 kernel patch[aur.archlinux.org] that I ported for NVIDIA 375.27.15 a few hours ago).

Any you are absolutly correct the 375.27.15 did the trick ... SteamVr is functional, though a bit buggy; it sometimes give warning about broke this or that... but it a lot better than what I had prior.... However, I keep getting a message about enabling direct mode whenever I start; I do press the button to enable direct mode but nothing changes .... in particular the log report still says Direct

Mode Graphics: Unknown ()

But for me this is what I should expect for a beta version of SteamVR.

One thing that concers me is the Nvidia 378.13 is specifically for GTX 1080 ti founder editions --when you select LINUX 64 that is the only driver option given. Although I cannot not quantify it at this time it feels as if 375.27.15 driver performance is a bit sluggesh compared to the 378.13 driver.

Thanks for all the help... at least I can proceed with my VR development efforts under openSuSE Tumbleweed

someone should pin down the rather important fact that SteamVR on Linux on works with Nvidia driver 375.27.15

[Cheeseness]

Glad to hear you're up and running!

I think there are issues on github about updating the readme there to more explicitly state required/expected drivers. I've been a little too focused on my own dev efforts to keep track of it myself.

I wasn't aware of any performance issues, but I also upgraded video card at the same time that I moved to the 375.25.x series, so I wouldn't have noticed if there are.

Direct mode is always enabled on Linux ("extended mode" isn't available regardless of whatever messages or warnings you might see - those are safe to ignore).

Best of luck with your development :)