The steam-runtime-tools library provides low-level Unix-specific tools and functionality for the Steam client, including the pressure-vessel tool that runs Steam games in containers.

To support multiple architectures (currently only i386 and x86_64 are supported), you will need to build it once for each architecture and install at least the helper tools in /usr/libexec/steam-runtime-tools-0 (the libsteam-runtime-tools-0-helpers package) for every architecture in parallel.

The helper tools are located relative to the shared library, so it's OK to bundle steam-runtime-tools alongside some other stack in this layout:

anything/
    lib/
        x86_64-linux-gnu/
            libsteam-runtime-tools-0.so.0
    libexec/
        steam-runtime-tools-0/
            i386-linux-gnu-*
            x86_64-linux-gnu-*

as long as the program that is linked to libsteam-runtime-tools-0.so.0 can find it (via a RPATH or RUNPATH or by setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable).

The pressure-vessel/ subdirectory of this project contains the pressure-vessel utilities, which are used by Steam's Steam Linux Runtime compatibility tool to run games in individual game-specific containers. For background on pressure-vessel and SteamLinuxRuntime, please see:

• https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/tree/master/doc
• https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/containers_steam/
• https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1638675549018366706/