kernelmechanic

A Zephyr-based bootloader for the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED with network-boot-over-wifi and hypervisor functionality.

Set up the build environment.

Requirements:

• A Linux-based OS
  • The following may work on macOS, but I cannot test that at this time. If you would like to try it and report back, please do. Just remember to download the macOS version of the Zephyr SDK instead of the Linux version.
• Git
• Python3
• Pip3

Instructions

1. Install "venv":

   pip3 install venv
   

2. run

   mkdir ~/steamdeckhacks
   python3 -m venv ~/steamdeckhacks/.venv
   cd ~/steamdeckhacks
   source .venv/bin/activate
   

3. You are now inside the "venv" environment. Here, we install the Zephyr repository managment tool, West.

   pip install west
   

4. Initialize the local checkout and then pull in all dependencies:

   west init -m https://github.com/skymage23/kernelmechanic.git
   west update
   

   If you want to contribute to the project, use git+ssh://git@github.com/skymage23/kernelmechanic.git instead when running west init. You could use HTTPS for this, but I find using SSH to be simpler.

   • You will need a GitHub account to do this.
   • You will also need to have set up an SSH public key for your GitHub account.

5. Your cloning of the repository is complete, but you must still install and set up the Zephyr SDK.

   wget https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/sdk-ng/releases/download/v0.16.4/zephyr-sdk-0.16.4_linux-x86_64.tar.xz
   tar -xvf zephyr-sdk-0.16.4_linux-x86_64.tar.xz
   cd zephyr-sdk-0.16.4
   setup.sh
   

   According to The Zephyr Project's documentation, you only have to run the setup.sh script once and then again should you move the SDK directory elsewhere.