Steam Headless v2 - Amazing!

I have five kids and the older couple are coming to an age where we occasionally let them play video games. I have been mostly out of the console game, but I have a decent Steam library and wanted a way to let them play at the same time. For my proof of concept, I picked up a few copies of Wreckfest and my goal was for all of us to be able to play together, utilizing one machine. Here *were* the specs of the machine when I first set out on this journey-

* AMD Ryzen 9 5900 XT (16c/32t)
* 64GB DDR4 3200
* 2TB WD NVME SSD
* 1x AMD RX 6800 16GB
* 2x NVidia P100 16GB (\~GTX 1080 performance)
* Linux Mint OS

One thing I liked about a containerized solution was that GPUs could be shared between containers (meaning a GPU could run more than one game concurrently) and I could utilize these retired AI GPUs without a display output.

After playing around for some time with Games on Whales/WOLF, I was having some issues with its design. For one, configuring it can be a bit confusing, and WOLF itself launches child docker containers that are not super configurable from a networking perspective (as far as I could tell). Specifically, I had issues with the different containers being able to communicate with each other, and I had some other strange issues with the platform as a whole (sometimes child containers got left running, for example) and it just felt a little clunky (scanning the logs for moonlight pairing codes).

I was considering just splitting it all up into different machines, until I discovered that there was a version 2 of Steam Headless. I had tried the original version and had some issues with audio and a few other things, but this new version looked really polished.

After giving it a quick go and seeing how well it worked with just my own instance, I created two more for the older boys. While the P100s worked fine, I wanted something that used less power at idle and offered additional scaling. It was at this time I discovered some AMD V540 GPUs for $99 each on ebay- I ordered two. The secret sauce here is that each of these is actually 2 GPUs (\~RX 5700) with 8GB of HBM per GPU, so these two add-in cards can be used for 4 instances of Steam Headless while idling at just a few watts. This is going to allow me to scale to more instance without too much concern about crowding GPUs (and 1080p without every detail is fine for their games).

For Steam apps, each child has their own account with the family sharing features and I am utilizing a shared directory to keep disk usage down. I am also emulating some XB360 games from a NAS. Games are streamed via Moonlight to whatever laptop we have laying around or to my Steam Link boxes (though Steam Remote Play also works). With this setup, I have even been able to stream games to myself at work over my lunch break on my phone VPN'd home, and it works great! And in case anyone is wondering, dad gets the RX 6800 to himself 😄 I have another 64GB RAM kit I can throw in if it looks like there is a need, otherwise it serves as a backup since I bought them cheap years ago.

Here is a link to the website (I have no affiliation)- [Steam Headless](https://steamheadless.com/)

Here is my compose today. You may notice I am setting core affinity, and this is because my CPU has 2 CCDs, so I am making sure each container stays within a single CCD.

```yml
name: steam-headless

x-base-service: &base-service
image: josh5/steam-headless:2
restart: unless-stopped
cap_add:
- DAC_READ_SEARCH
- NET_ADMIN
- SYS_ADMIN
- SYS_NICE
- SYS_PTRACE
security_opt:
- apparmor:unconfined
- seccomp=unconfined
- systempaths=unconfined
- writable-cgroups=true
cgroup: private
stop_signal: SIGRTMIN+3
stop_grace_period: 30s
pids_limit: 8192
shm_size: 2gb
device_cgroup_rules:
- 'c 13:* rwm'
tmpfs:
- /run
- /run/lock
- /tmp
- /dev/input:rw,dev,mode=075


services:
dad-steamheadless:
<<: *base-service
container_name: dad-steamheadless
hostname: dad-steamheadless
environment:
PUID: '1000'