FEX 2603 Released With A Partial Fix For The Steam GUI Crashing On AArch64

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 4 March 2026 at 08:21 PM EST. 9 Comments

FEX 2603 as the Valve-sponsored open-source project allowing Linux x86/x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 Linux -- including the likes of Steam and various games as will become important with the Steam Frame -- is now out with its newest monthly release.

Important this month in FEX 2603 is partially addressing the Steam web helper process crashing. This ended up being due to a Chromium CEF update not jiving well with FEX at the moment. The issue is partially resolved as explained in today's FEX 2603 release announcement:

"One of the bugs we encountered that caused us to cancel last month’s release was a spurious crash that occurs with Steam’s steamwebhelper process. This ends up behaving like Steam is crashing constantly and coming back. What’s actually happening is one of the steamwebhelper processes crashes, and then steam restarts it consistently. This isn’t actually a regression on the FEX side, but a change that occured in Steam late last year that we didn’t notice initially. The CEF version that Steam is shipping has updated to change some behaviour around FD handling that FEX interacts badly with. We haven’t fully worked around the issue so Steam’s GUI may still crash fairly frequently, but as long as FEX’s logging is disabled then it is less likely to occur."

FEX 2603 is also now hiding Arm big.LITTLE CPU core layouts by default to avoid some games with anti-tamper breaking over the differing CPU core names.

👁 Steam on AArch64 with FEX

FEX 2603 also has various other fixes, allocator improvements, more JIT optimizations, and several Linux front-end improvements.

Downloads for FEX 2603 via GitHub and more details on the release via the project site at FEX-Emu.com.