"We Will Look Into This": Valve Answered a Steam Frame Disc Drive Request With Three Kernel Config Lines

Three lines went in. CONFIG_CDROM=m, CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SR=m and CONFIG_CHR_DEV_SG=m, added to arch/arm64/configs/gabe_defconfig, the file that configures the kernel Valve builds SteamOS from for the Steam Frame. Two lines marking the last two as unset came out. The commit is b68e4a1, authored by Valve's Gabe Rowe, and its message reads "gabe_defconfig: add support for cdrom drives for parity with steamdeck/machine."

The prompt was a forum post. On October 18 at 9:19am Pacific, a user posting as Aiodensghost opened a thread in Steam Frame General Discussions titled "Why can't I use my detachable disc drive?" He wanted two things out of a disc on the road: a movie, and an install of the 2006 copy of Need for Speed Carbon he still owns. The post closed with "May I PLEASE have the ability to use an optical drive?"

Gabe Rowe replied the next afternoon at 12:43pm Pacific, posting as gaberowe under a Valve developer tag. The whole reply: "we will look into this thanks for alerting us."

The commit followed that reply by 8 minutes and 53 seconds. The reply is stamped 19:43:01 UTC, the commit 19:51:54 UTC, and its author and committer dates match, so it was not rebased onto that time later. Tom's Hardware spotted it first, on October 24, and put the gap at under ten minutes. PC Gamer followed two days later.

What three symbols buy

All three are set to m, so they build as loadable modules rather than into the kernel. BLK_DEV_SR is the SCSI CD-ROM block driver, which is what a USB optical drive presents itself as. CHR_DEV_SG is the generic SCSI pass-through device, and CONFIG_CDROM is the common CD-ROM layer the sr driver is built on.

Together they let the kernel see a drive and read a disc. That is all. They install nothing that plays a DVD or a Blu-ray, and they do not add the decryption those discs are wrapped in. They also do nothing about power, which was the first complaint in the original post. A defconfig cannot change what a port delivers. Valve's spec sheet lists the rear USB-C port for charging and data and gives it no output rating. The one accessory power budget Valve has published belongs to the nose bridge expansion port, 3.1 volts at up to 2 amps, roughly 6 watts. A disc drive does not plug in there.

The commit message gives the reason the change was cheap. Parity with the Steam Deck. The Deck has carried these symbols for years. The question was never whether the drivers work on a Valve device, only whether anyone had switched them on for this one. Three config symbols is a measured answer to a post written partly in capital letters.

The repository is an unofficial GitHub mirror, set up on October 17. Its predecessor, the mirror that gave up the Plano OLED panel driver two weeks ago, is still online but no longer carries the full tree. Valve publishes the Frame's kernel source and the mirror puts each commit on GitHub, which is why a one-file config change reads as news.

What it means if you own one

Nothing yet. The change sits on a kernel branch, and it reaches headsets only when a SteamOS build made from that branch ships. Valve has given no date.

When it arrives, a drive with its own power supply should mount. A bus-powered one is a question mark. Reading data off a disc should work. Watching a film will still need playback software the Frame does not ship, and a commercial DVD or Blu-ray is still encrypted.

Need for Speed Carbon is a maybe. The retail PC disc carries SafeDisc copy protection, and the game would have to clear it under Proton and FEX on an ARM chip. Nobody has shown that working yet.

The original poster has already moved on to the power half. "Valve adding driver support to the kernel is good enough for me," he wrote on October 25. He is now shopping for a USB hub that can power the drive and pass its data through at the same time, because the 60W one he tried first was not enough.