Valve’s Steam Deck with SteamOS features built-in crash data collection as well as for logging other system events worth having knowledge about like the split-lock detection and other events. This is all opt-in by users for data collection by Steam, but for those curious about a bit more insight into this Steam Deck data collection, a presentation at this past week’s Linux Plumbers Conference dove into the matter.
Guilherme Piccoli of Linux consulting firm Igalia who has been a long time partner with Valve presented on the data collection leveraged by Valve’s Steam Deck. The data collection is focused both on being able to deal with software/hardware breakage as well as areas where software developers can better optimize their game/engine/library to better handle Steam Deck / SteamOS.
Breakages like crashes, GPU hangs, kernel oops, and more are obviously important as are out-of-memory events, split lock detection, and other such data that is useful but not critical.
Again, with the Steam Deck / SteamOS the data collection by Valve is all opt-in. Those curious and wanting to learn more about this Steam Deck data collection functionality can see this PDF slide deck for the details. The video recordings from LPC 2025 aren’t yet available.
