Steam freeze / stall when launching a game while the Steam Controller is connected

[javaJake]

Your system information

• Steam client version (build number or date): 1785799196
• Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): CachyOS
• Opted into Steam client beta?: [Yes/No] No
• Have you checked for system updates?: [Yes/No] Yes
• Steam Logs: steam-logs.tar.gz
• GPU: AMD 9070 XT

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

When I launch a game with Steam, the status on Steam will stay "Launching" perpetually. Sometimes (not always) the main Steam window will close itself. While the game is stuck "Launching", I am able to right click games and see the right-click menu, or browse the main Steam window menu, but no menu options trigger any reaction, including "Exit".

Steps for reproducing this issue:

1. Turn on the Steam Controller.
2. Open Steam.
3. Launch a game.
4. If the game does launch, the same Steam freeze can be triggered by pressing Shift+Tab or the Steam button. The overlay will fail to present. Sometimes the game will continue to run, however.

Sometimes, the freeze doesn't happen on the first try. In the case where the logs are attached, I launched and closed Sky Children of Light a few times, then launched and closed the Final Fantasy 14 launcher once, then on the next Sky run, the freeze triggered.

[javaJake]

My intuition is that this is a race condition of some kind (two things trying to read or write to the same thing and they are stepping on each other's toes).

[javaJake]

I've been messing to gather information for this report, and came across this incident:

1. After a killall -SEGV steam to close Steam, and waiting for the remaining processes to clean up, I then ran Steam again.
2. I tried disabling the overlay via the main Steam Settings menu, and games no longer froze. However, the Steam Controller also no longer registered as a game controller, and continued to function as it does on the desktop.
3. I tried then re-enabling the overlay, and the games still would not freeze. However, the Steam Controller is also refusing to be recognized at this point, even though I can press Shift+Tab to bring up the overlay.
4. Going into the Steam Settings, under Controller, I can see the Puck and the Controller listed.
5. Unplugging the puck did not remove them from this list.
6. At this point I selected Steam -> Exit, expecting to close Steam and grab a new report. However, while the main window closed, the tray icon did not, and I realized Steam was still running in the background.

I have grabbed a new set of Steam logs for this incident, which seems related: steam-logs.tar.gz

[javaJake]

Please let me know if there is anything I can do to debug or gather more information. I am reasonably comfortable with most Linux debugging tools, but Steam is a closed source binary so I am just trying to read tea leaves. :)

[javaJake]

Here is a copy of my journalctl log after I clicked Start on the game. It ended up being particularly noisy: journalctl.log

Edit: to be clear, what happened is, after my last set of logs, I once again used killall -SEGV steam and waited for remaining Steam processes to clean up. I then relaunched Steam, ensured the overlay was on already, the controller and puck were already detected (they were plugged in and turned on before running Steam), and went to launch Sky Children of Light. On my first attempt, I triggered the freeze.

[i-h8-github]

Same issue here.

[javaJake]

Oddly, I have not had this issue in a while. I have not done anything besides turn my computer on and keep up with updates. No settings changes, or tweaks, or anything. Just click play on games and take updates as they come. Very strange.