A Steam Deck plugin for the Decky Plugin Loader that makes it possible to pause and resume games even for those that don't have an immediate pause option.
Useful for when you wish to temporarily suspend an application in order to redirect the cpu and gpu ressources to another without having to close it.
Since used RAM and VRAM won't be able to be recovered from paused apps you might look into tweaking your swapfile to make things smoother: https://github.com/CryoByte33/steam-deck-utilities
It sends the SIGSTOP signal to all the children of the reaper process to stop the execution and SIGCONT to resume them. (Signal (IPC))
It also allows to pause all games prior to system suspend which seems to fix some issues with crackling audio or freezing emulators.
The Pause on focus loss feature will automatically pause apps that are not in focus when switching between them. A bit like the Xbox quick-suspend/resume feature (without the dump to disk functionality unfortunately). If you manually change the state of an app (pause/resume) in this mode it will be stickied and not change state automatically anymore on focus change (depicted by a blue play/pause icon). To reset the stickied states, disable and re-enable Pause on focus loss.
- even without the plugin, multiple non-steam games behave weirdly and may not close correctly (or at least Steam gets stuck on the shutdown screen)
- options to terminate and force kill more "thoroughly" and immediately a process tree
- checkpoint/restore support with CRIU to make it possible to dump and restore a game to/from disk (savestates)
- I already conducted some experiments but the biggest hurdle are the sockets and dri devices which would require many interdependant processes to be checkpointed too
- A completely isolated process and resource tree seems to be the only viable way currently to get something working (see podman/docker checkpoint/restore) but even then there are host only sockets (pipewire, wayland, xorg) that would need to be taken into account too for games to work