Pause Frametop for VR games

Frametop kept using the headset during games: with gaze mode off, our eye tracker still took
about 60% of a core, remote desktop about 2 cores while on, and KWin kept drawing hidden
screens because ft-screens sent their frame callbacks at 90 Hz. Pausing gives that back, and
resuming brings back only what pausing stopped. It's also a way to keep the gaze service and
our eye tracker off during games, which PR #13 asked for.

Paused (input/game_pause.py, run by the input relay):
- frametop-gaze stops (ft-eyegrab then idles by itself), and hand tracking and remote desktop
  stop if they run
- the desktop hides and slows down: ft-screens "pause on" hides every panel and sends KWin a
  frame callback once a second; or, with pause_desktop "close", the desktop closes and starts
  again on resume
- the relay lets go of the 3D mouse, typing goes to Steam, and mapped buttons and key
  combinations do only pause_toggle, steam_menu and commands

Toggled by both thumbsticks clicked together twice (configurable), read passively from
vrserver's web socket (input/vrws.py) so it works in games and takes nothing from them; by the
new pause_toggle action; by input/ft-pause; and, with pause_auto (default on), by a VR game
starting and ending, which the pointer helper now reports ("vrgame 1|0"). Frametop Input
Settings has a Games page for it. update-check.py checks the web socket, and doesn't count a
paused gaze service as failed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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DeeJanuzandClaude Opus 5.5 committed 2026-10-02 21:58:09 -06:00
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@@ -189,6 +189,15 @@ Movement is judged within 10-second windows. On the mount, the head pose jittere
Staying awake while charging uses Steam's own setting rather than a logind sleep inhibitor. Steam suspends with `dbus-send ... login1.Manager.Suspend boolean:true`, and a block inhibitor does stop that (`CanSuspend` answers "challenge" while one is held), but it stops the power button too. `system_idle_suspend_ac_sec` is field 24004 of Steam's CMsgClientSettings. In Steam's SharedJSContext, reachable over CDP on port 8080 because Steam runs with `-cef-enable-debugging`, `SteamClient.Settings.SetSetting` takes a change as a base64 protobuf, the way Steam's Power page sends it (0 is never), and `settingsStore.clientSettings` has the current values.
## Pausing for VR games
Hiding the screens during a game kept them out of view, but Frametop kept using the headset. Measured on 2026-10-02 with gaze mode off and no game running, in shares of one core: our eye tracker (ft-eyes) about 60%, ft-eyegrab, ft-gaze and ft-gazed about 3 to 4% each; remote desktop (krdpserver, FreeRDP, Xvnc) about 2 cores while it ran; KWin about 13%, ft-screens about 4%. The gaze service runs at full rate whether gaze mode is on or not. Reading SteamVR's eye tracking 90 times a second also made it restart every 10 to 13 seconds during Beat Saber, and each restart took input focus from the game, which paused it (PR #13; since then ft-gaze skips SteamVR's gaze action during games, but our own tracker kept running). So pausing stops what costs the most and leaves windows where they are.
- A hidden screen still cost as much as a visible one. ft-screens sent every committed screen its frame callback at 90 Hz whether its overlay showed or not, so KWin kept drawing, and its apps with it. Paused, ft-screens sends the callbacks once a second. A Wayland client draws again only after its last frame's callback, so KWin's output stalls, KWin's own clients stop getting theirs, and the whole desktop idles, without anything losing its connection. A second's pace, rather than none, keeps any client that waits on a callback from waiting forever. Stopping KWin or the apps with SIGSTOP would free the same, but a Wayland peer that stops reading overflows the other side's 4 KB socket buffer, which ends the connection: that's how the live desktop died once when its KWin stalled (`Data too big for buffer`). They also sit in different cgroups (KWin under steam.service when the VR launcher starts it, ft-screens in the dev container's), so no single freeze stops them together.
- The relay does the pausing because it's the one part that always runs, and the pointer helper keeps running because stopping it leaves its virtual controller connected with its last pose (the driver has no staleness timeout), maybe holding a hand role, with the 3D mouse dead. Releasing it does the job. The helper already checks for a scene app twice a second, so it's what tells the relay a game started.
- The gesture has to work during a game, but SteamVR input reaches only the app with input focus, and an overlay with global input (`steamvr/globalActionSetPriority`) takes the buttons it binds from the game. vrserver's web socket on 127.0.0.1:27062, which its controller binding page uses for the live view, reports every controller component whatever has focus, and reading it takes nothing. The game sees the clicks too, so the default is a gesture games hardly use: both thumbsticks, together, twice. "Together" means within 0.3 seconds of each other, so a stick held down to sprint while the other clicks doesn't count. The stream is about 160 messages a second, nearly all capacitive sensing, so the reader parses only the few that mention a gesture's button. A controller's root path changes while the 3D mouse holds its hand role (`/devices/cv/<serial>` instead of `/user/hand/right`), so the reader looks the controllers up again every 3 seconds.
- Resuming starts remote desktop through `systemd-run --scope`: started straight from the relay, it would join the relay's cgroup and end with the next relay restart.
## SteamOS updates
On the Frame, SteamVR is part of the OS image (`/opt/steamvr`, the `deckard-steamvr-rel` package), next to KWin, gamescope, and the kernel, so every SteamOS update can bring a new SteamVR too. Frametop survives updates: it lives in the home folder and the `dev` container, the Bluetooth fixes are in `/etc`, which SteamOS keeps across updates, and nothing goes into `/usr`. What an update can break is what Frametop uses from the image. The public OpenVR API is versioned and stays put. The rest is less certain: `IVRIPCResourceManagerClient`, which is newer than the header SteamVR ships; the text `vrcmd --overlays` prints; the eye tracker's shared memory layout; XRService's camera buffers; KWin's nested backend; and behavior Frametop works around, such as the SteamVR Settings page that `ComputeOverlayIntersection` can't find or the scale KWin's nested backend doesn't undo.