Field report, Nobara + 0.20.0: switching into Game Mode mid-stream
disconnects the client and the box never lights up again. His journal has
the whole mechanism, ten seconds apart:
12:34:18.9 freed Steam: stopped the display manager for this stream
12:34:29.0 systemd[1685]: Stopping punktfunk-host.service
Stopping the display manager ends the user's last login session. The
packaged host is a `systemd --user` unit, so logind then stops
user@1000.service once UserStopDelaySec elapses — 10s by default on Nobara
— and takes the host with it. The stream dies, the scheduled restore never
runs, and the display manager stays down with nothing left to restart it:
a black box that needs a VT to recover. Exactly the two symptoms reported,
and the intermittency is just whether an active Gaming Mode session was
there to trigger the takeover at all.
It never showed on the repro VM because lingering was enabled there for the
earlier sessionless tests (`Linger=yes` — confirmed on the VM today), which
is precisely the thing that breaks the dependency: logind keeps the user
manager alive with no session. Our KDE/GNOME/Arch setup guides already ask
for it; his box, following the KDE route, did not have it.
So the takeover now ensures lingering BEFORE it touches the display
manager: `loginctl enable-linger` directly (allow_active in logind's own
policy — verified working unprivileged on Nobara), else the packaged helper
gains a `linger` verb that enables it for PKEXEC_UID alone, never a
caller-named user. If neither works the takeover is refused with an
actionable error and managed degrades to attach — mirroring the box's own
session is strictly better than a screen that needs a VT. Hosts that cannot
be reached this way (root, a system unit) skip the check: the cgroup test
is a pure `cgroup_under_user_manager` with a unit test, matched against the
real shapes on a Nobara box (`user@1000.service/app.slice/...` vs a
`session-N.scope`).
Also documents the requirement in the gamescope guide's Nobara section.
Checked on Linux: clippy -D warnings, 78 tests, rustfmt; helper verified
with `sh -n`, and the linger enable/disable round-trip run live on the
Nobara VM.
Field report (Nobara, 0.19.2): entering Game Mode mid-stream left the monitor
on and the stream mirroring at the desktop's resolution. Root cause: the
DM-flavor takeover needs privilege to stop plasmalogin, the polkit rule is a
docs-only manual step nobody installs, so every managed entry silently
degraded to ATTACH — and with a physical display connected the attach path
mirrors the box's own session at its own mode.
Ship the privilege with the packages instead: a root helper
(libexec/punktfunk/pf-dm-helper, verbs stop|restore) behind its own polkit
action (io.unom.punktfunk.dm-helper, allow_any — the same mechanism Nobara's
os-session-select uses, and the helper derives the DM unit from the
display-manager.service symlink itself so callers never name a unit across
the privilege boundary). The host tries the plain system-bus verbs first
(root / operator rule still take precedence), then pkexec's the helper; the
restore paths (idle restore + in-stream desktop-switch honor) use the same
ladder so a takeover that needed the helper can always be undone by it.
Packaged in rpm/deb/arch (Arch under /usr/lib/punktfunk with the policy's
exec.path annotation rewritten; the host probes both layouts). Nix is left
out deliberately: store paths can't match the probe, NixOS keeps the manual
rule. Docs updated — the rule snippet stays as the scoped alternative.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
enricobuehler
