Frame Home as the real SteamVR environment on a PC (Windows too), not a home app

On the Steam Frame a layer inside SteamVR's compositor draws the home where it would draw Aurora, so the home is the
environment itself: at boot, during game loads, behind the Steam menu, with the controllers and passthrough, and it
steps aside for a game the instant it opens. On a PC this was faked with SteamVR's home-app slot and a flat 360 photo
in the gaps, which launched and handed off like an app and showed a picture, not the live home. This does it properly
on any PC that runs SteamVR, the Frame's way:

- Windows: the compositor is Direct3D 11, so the layer is a proxy d3d11.dll beside the compositor (layer/
  frame_home_layer_d3d11.cpp, built from the .def that forwards every other export to the real d3d11.dll, kept as
  fh_d3d11real.dll). It wraps the compositor's device, finds Aurora's draws by their shader bytecode and draws the
  home over the sky, leaving the floor and stars off; everything else passes straight through. Pure pass-through in
  any process that isn't vrcompositor.
- The home's frames cross from Frame Home (Vulkan) to the compositor (D3D11): the layer owns kSlots shared textures
  and hands Frame Home their NT handles over a named pipe; Frame Home imports them (VK_KHR_external_memory_win32) and
  renders into them. No cross-API lock — a slot is published only once the GPU has finished it and the four rotate,
  as on Linux. The shared State stays Frame Home's.
- The Environments panel runs frame-home --system and keeps it alive (one at a time, a pid file across panel
  restarts), the same systemEnv path as the Frame. The installer places/removes the proxy and marks the layer with a
  root/layer folder, in place of the old home-app registration and background pictures.
- Safe like the Vulkan layer: no home, or one stale over half a second, and the compositor draws Aurora as usual;
  the layer turns itself off after two unhealthy compositor starts, and root/layer/off turns it off by hand.

Linux keeps its Vulkan layer (unchanged). Verified without a headset on the null driver: the proxy loads and wraps
the compositor without crashing, recognises Aurora's shaders, and the frame hand-over completes (Frame Home connects,
imports the textures, renders). The compositor only draws the environment while presenting to a headset, so the final
on-headset image is the one step the null driver can't exercise.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
ToastconcernandClaude Opus 4.8 committed 2026-10-21 19:39:36 -05:00
1 parent 283e19f87c
commit d22cc04cb3
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@@ -142,6 +142,23 @@ inline int run(const std::vector<std::string>& args, int nice, bool wait) {
CloseHandle(pi.hProcess);
return static_cast<int>(code);
}
// Starts args[0] detached (its own process, no window) and returns its pid, or 0. appKey, when given, is set as
// STEAMVR_APPKEY for the child so SteamVR takes it as that application (the environment renderer is its own identity).
inline Pid spawn(const std::vector<std::string>& args, const char* appKey = nullptr) {
std::wstring cl = commandLine(args);
if (appKey) SetEnvironmentVariableA("STEAMVR_APPKEY", appKey);
STARTUPINFOW si = {};
si.cb = sizeof si;
PROCESS_INFORMATION pi = {};
const BOOL ok = CreateProcessW(nullptr, cl.data(), nullptr, nullptr, FALSE, CREATE_NO_WINDOW | DETACHED_PROCESS, nullptr, nullptr, &si, &pi);
if (appKey) SetEnvironmentVariableA("STEAMVR_APPKEY", nullptr);
if (!ok) return 0;
const Pid pid = pi.dwProcessId;
CloseHandle(pi.hThread);
CloseHandle(pi.hProcess);
return pid;
}
// This program again with the same arguments (settings that build the renderer differently, a lost GPU); this one
// ends. SteamVR knows its home app by its file, so the new one is still the environment.
[[noreturn]] inline void restartSelf() {