Steam Deck Motion Sensors Being Worked On For Linux's HID-Steam Driver

A patch is undergoing work to add Steam Deck IMU support to the HID-Steam kernel driver for supporting the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors of the Steam Deck controller.

The patches by independent developer Max Maisel allow for the accelerometer and gyroscope features to be exposed to user-space via a separate evdev node with the HID-Steam driver, the kernel driver supporting the Steam Controller and Steam Deck input functionality.

This exposing of the Steam Deck IMU support via separate evdev nodes match the behavior of the Nintendo and PlayStation HID kernel drivers for exposing these motion sensors.

Valve recommends using the Steam Input API for accessing Steam Deck input controls such as the accelerometer/gyroscope while this is nice support for those not wanting to rely on Steam's API or adapting the Steam Deck for other non-gaming uses. The proposed HID-Steam patch has been successfully tested with the latest SDL2 / SDL3 libraries.

More details for those interested in this HID-Steam kernel driver work via the Linux kernel mailing list.