Guide to Asahi Linux Fedora running Steam | microVM

Introduction

I heard about Asahi Linux back in the early days and became one of its followers/supporters.  I believe having the arm ecosystem and an option to run linux on mac systems a must first step in many developments including fully adapability in an newer architecture.  This guide is for owners of M1 or M2 macs running fedora linux 40 in order to run steam games.

For the past little while I have been diving into this Linux stack trying to replicate the rumored steam installation and running of various games on Fedora Linux on a mac. The source of this material is from slp's blog and also Rob Clark’s XDC 2022 talk about Virtgpu DRM native context, a novel technique that brings close-to-native GPU performance to VMs.

The problem with Asahi Linux is a paging size problem in running steam which requires 4k pages while the operating system uses 16k pages.  The x86_64 games on steam runs on 4k size pages.  Understand the experimental nature of doing this. Do not bug the Asahi Liux Developers about this.  This guide can break at any time. It is working as of May 2024.

The Guide

Install Fedora Remix 40

https://asahilinux.org/fedora/

Install Distrobox

sudo dnf copr enable alciregi/distrobox

sudo dnf install distrobox

Use distrobox to create image

    export DBX_CONTAINER_MANAGER=podman
    distrobox create --image quay.io/fedora/fedora-toolbox:40-aarch64 --name asahi-krun --volume ~/.config/pulse

Enter Distrobox

    distrobox enter asahi-krun

When ready your prompt should look like this [username@asahi-krun ~]$

Install krun and dependencies inside the container

sudo dnf copr enable slp/asahi-mesa-wip
sudo dnf copr enable teohhanhui/asahi-krun
sudo dnf --best install alsa-lib alsa-plugins-pulseaudio alsa-utils dhclient eglinfo glmark2 glx-utils libkrun mesa-demos mesa-dri-drivers passt pipewire-libs pulseaudio pulseaudio-libs pulseaudio-utils sommelier virglrenderer xorg-x11-server-Xwayland --exclude pipewire
cd ~/Downloads
git clone https://github.com/slp/krun.git
cd krun
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
. ~/.cargo/env
sudo dnf group install c-development
sudo dnf install clang-devel libkrun-devel llvm-devel
cargo build --release
sudo cp target/release/krun{,-guest} /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/krun{,-guest}
sudo chown -R $USER: ~/.config/pulse

Save the krun file from this gist as ~/.local/bin/krun, then chmod +x ~/.local/bin/krun. This will be your entry point to run anything inside krun VM.

krun