SteamOS Manager for BIOS updates, TDP and GPU clock controls now open source
On Valve’s official public GitLab, they’ve recently put up SteamOS Manager under the open source MIT license following the SteamOS 3.7 release for more devices.
What is it? SteamOS Manager is a “system daemon that aims to abstract Steam’s interactions with the operating system”. Valve’s goal with it is to “have a standardized interface so that SteamOS specific features in the Steam client, e.g. TDP management, can be exposed in any linux distro that provides an implementation of this DBus API”.
Some of the features it enables includes:
- GPU clock management.
- TDP management.
- BIOS/Dock updates.
- Storage device maintenance tasks.
- External storage device formatting.
- Max battery charge level.
And more.
Seems like this will be useful for other hardware vendors to hook up and test SteamOS integration. And probably other Linux distributions aimed at handhelds too (Bazzite, ChimeraOS and so on).
Here’s the fun thing: in their full specification, it includes a feature named “EnterDownloadMode” which the code comments notes, “Enter a low power mode for downloads and get a handle that will keep this mode active until all obtained handles are dropped”.
It’s not clear if this is something used by SteamOS already, or if it’s the feature that has been requested by Steam Deck owners again and again and again to download while the screen is off (sounds like it could be related). I’ve emailed Valve to see if they want to comment on that.
See more on their GitLab.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
