Arch Linux

waffle32

Member

Registered: 2024-12-21

Posts: 6

AppArmor restricting Steam from launching

Hi all:

I seem to be unable to launch Steam on my desktop as of this week. This is a 3-year-old install that's never had issues with this.

When I launch Steam (native version) from command line, I see the following error:

 steam-runtime-check-requirements[12578]: W: Child process exited with code 1: bwrap: setting up uid map: Permission denied 

And Steam tells me that it needs user namespaces to be enabled.

I've already checked what seem to be the obvious culprits of this issue online:

cat /proc/sys/kernel/unprivileged_userns_clone 

returns 1

and permissions on /usr/bin/bwrap are -rwsr-xr-x.

I assume this is somehow an AppArmor error because if I use

aa-teardown

then Steam is able to launch. I don't have a Steam AppArmor profile defined.

Running

aa-status

in another terminal window while Steam is running yields the following related profiles are being called:

usr/bin/bash (12799) steam//null-/usr/bin/bash//null-/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steam.sh//null-/usr/bin/bash
   /usr/bin/zenity (12931) steam//null-/usr/bin/bash//null-/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steam.sh//null-/usr/bin/bash//null-/usr/bin/zenity
   /home/user/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/usr/libexec/steam-runtime-tools-0/srt-logger (12814) steam//null-/usr/bin/bash//null-/home/user/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/usr/libexec/steam-runtime-tools-0/srt-logger//null-/home/user/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/usr/libexec/steam-runtime-tools-0/srt-logger

Is there any way to fix this without modifying the AppArmor profiles for bash and zenity? Those are being pulled from the AppArmor abstractions folder, and I don't want to compromise system security just to make Steam run - especially considering it played very well with my AppArmor setup until just recently. I don't have any homemade profiles activated - I use the stock profiles plus

krathalans-apparmor-profiles-git

and that's it.

My system is up-to-date as of 8 July.

Thanks!

Last edited by waffle32 (2025-07-08 23:28:58)