Valve says it has removed the VK_KHR_maintenance9 requirement behind Steam Link VR startup failures on Nvidia's 580 drivers on Linux. The change will arrive in the next SteamVR beta. MIXED's report says that beta had yet to ship, with 2.18.2 still the newest build following its October 1 release.
The October 3 tracker reply, posted at 14:38 UTC, gives neither a version number nor a release date. Affected users have an announced fix to wait for, but no published build identified as carrying it. This follows our September 30 coverage of the driver incompatibility.
What failed, and what Valve changed
The original report describes a Quest 3S connecting to a GTX 1660 SUPER Linux PC before Vulkan device creation fails. The log returns VK_ERROR_EXTENSION_NOT_PRESENT, error code -7, and SteamVR displays graphics error 405.
An RTX 2060 owner then traced the missing extension to VK_KHR_maintenance9. Their driver 580.159.03 exposed maintenance1 through maintenance8. They reported the same failure over Wi-Fi and wired USB. Removing the requirement targets that startup failure.
The available workarounds depend on the card
Owners in the tracker report that newer drivers expose the missing extension. One lists it as present in 595.91.07 and 610.57.04. Another reported working VR streaming after changing their Bazzite system variant, moving to driver 615.71.09 and using SteamVR beta.
Rolling SteamVR back has mixed results. An RTX 4060 owner reported the same error on the previous 2.16.7 branch with driver 580.178.04. Pascal owners also pointed out that Nvidia's open kernel modules do not support their GTX 10-series cards, which rules out the reported Bazzite open-module route for them.
