this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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From both a technical perspective and if the maintainers of these anti-cheat will consider porting or re-writing kernel level anti-cheat to work on linux, is it possible? Do you think that the maintainers of kernel level anti-cheat will be adamant in not doing it, or that the kernel even supports it or will support it. I think that if it ever happens, there will be a influx of people moving to linux, or abandoning their duelboots, and that alot of people will hate that such a thing is available on linux.

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[–] coconut@programming.dev 67 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Sure hope not. If I wanted to run rookits I'd just use Windows. Why bother with Linux?

This is why I don't want more Linux adoption and don't understand people cheering every new user. We're in a sweet spot where a lot of games enable userland anticheat while we don't get kernel level ports (however they may be shipped doesn't matter). The only thing that'll come out of more adoption is kernel level anticheat ports that'll probably work with a few corporate backed distros only and we'll actually lose the games we have today. Because those will switch over the kernel level alternatives too.

The only way I'd like Linux to be a generic multiplayer platform is server side anticheats. It is very obviously the way to go and we are seeing extremely slow adoption (e.g. Marvel Rivals).

[–] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

TBH I'm not sure wider adoption would worsen things ? Gaming distros would probably ship bullshit anticheat modules by default while the others would not, or at most provide some documentation on how to opt in.

I think it's quite similar to the situation with NVIDIA proprietary drivers? (I don't own a graphics card so I'm not super aware on this topic)

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[–] MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de 36 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I think its less a question of the technical feasibility, and more of an issue that we, as users, don't want more closed-source blobs in our kernels. Meanwhile, the publishers insist that they can't open-source their anti-cheat code; Their idea being that if we know what's in it, it will be easier to bypass.

Basically, one distro or a few(at most) may get anti-cheat integrated one day(like, say, SteamOS), but it will likely never be in your standard Linux kernal.

They could go the rought of kernel modules, I would think, but for whatever reason, we're still having this conversation.

[–] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

@MachineFab812 @SpiderUnderUrBed even if you have steamOS, what keeps you from downloading kernels from kernel.org and building?

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[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 0 points 6 days ago

Shite is still shite, even if it's open source shite.

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[–] kadup@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Absolutely nothing prevents somebody from writing a kernel level anticheat on Linux.

Users would throw a fit, and it would be way easier to bypass, but it certainly could be made.

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[–] bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net 16 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It already works, but studios using anticheats that DO support Linux CURRENTLY don't bother implementing it because we're maaaaaybe 3% of the market on a good day, so they say "fuck it" and don't expend a few dev hours to enable it because they see it as a pain to deal with v users who need it.

[–] bonn2@lemmy.zip 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

AFAIK the current anticheat systems on Linux only run in userspace not at kernel level. This does mean Linux is theoretically easier to bypass compared to windows, some games just dont seem to want to take that risk. For as you said 3% of the market.

I personally disagree with that stance though, because all it takes is a hardware device and all software anticheats are useless no matter the os (think a raspberry pi, and capture card). So anticheat is really a losing battle anyways.

[–] SmoochyPit@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 week ago

Yeah… Apex Legends dropped Linux support a while ago and that’s one of the reasons they cited; and tbf, there were publicly available Linux cheats that ran under proton.

But there’s also loads of publicly available “external” cheats that run the way you described. Some run through a virtual machine even. It’s just not a robust solution for preventing cheating, and mostly hurts the legit Linux players.

[–] jay@mbin.zerojay.com 5 points 1 week ago

It's a lot more than just "a few dev hours". You need to invest in training your testers on Linux, potentially purchasing new hardware, invest in programmers that can deal with writing for Linux, etc... Just because something like BattlEye has a checkbox for Linux support doesn't mean that all it takes is to click the button and rebuild your game.

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[–] JTskulk@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (9 children)

I'm not a programmer or cheater or anything, but I think the answer is yes and no. Yes it could technically be done and even work as intended as long as the device is locked down to prevent the user from replacing the shipped kernel (which would be a bad thing for users). However, savvy people could (in theory) make custom kernels that lie to the kernel module, causing the module to report there is no cheating when there is. It's my understanding that it's close to the current situation with Windows and virtual machines and anticheat: you can cheat by running your game in a VM and then have that virtual hardware extract secret information or flip bits in the right spots. Most competitive games will refuse to run in a VM for this reason.

[–] homura1650@lemm.ee 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

This is where TPMs, measured boot, and remote attestation come in.

You can run whatever kernel you want, but if it is not an approved kernel, you wouldn't be able to attest to running an approved kernel; allowing whatever DRM scheme the developer put in to active.

I believe this is how the higher levels of Android's Play Integrity system work.

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[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago

I hope to fuck not.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

What does it even mean? People can recompile the kernel to turn the crap off.

[–] 0xtero@beehaw.org 2 points 6 days ago

And then the game wouldn’t work.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

You don't even need to do that. You could just blacklist or delete the module.

The game wouldnt work, but you could do it.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 week ago

The game developers could if they wanted to, but I hope they won't. I will not willingly install a rootkit on any of my computers. I wouldn't buy or pirate a game that requires one even if it could run on Linux. I don't even like running user level anti cheat, but at least that can be run in a sandbox.

[–] Godort@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Is it possible to have kernel-level anti-cheat in Linux?

Yes, Absolutely. But, people would throw a fit. There is probably no way to opensource it without also making it easier to bypass. There would be a concerted effort to reverse engineer it and remove it from the system while maintaining functionality

Maintainers of anti-cheat software are not volunteers. If there was an order from management to port the system to Linux, it would happen. It's just that with the Linux userbase as small as it is, it's simply not profitable to cater to them.

I think that if it ever happens, there will be a influx of people moving to linux, or abandoning their duelboots

I fully disagree. The thing keeping regular people away from Linux as an OS is not that they can't play some online game with Anti-cheat.

Linux is in a weird place right now. It's actually a perfect fit for non-technical users that use their computers for email, web browsing, and Netflix, but those users don't know what an operating system is, let alone that there are options. More technical users tend to require more specialized applications, and if there isn't a native linux port available, you have to do some research for alternatives, or to find a way to run it in wine.

Windows is shitty, but it's comfortable. And I know that it will run any software I throw at it with basically no research or troubleshooting.

[–] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 3 points 1 week ago

@Godort @SpiderUnderUrBed That's really the conundrum, in an open source kernel, where can you put anti-cheat that someone else can't readily pull out?

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[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 2 points 1 week ago

I feel like bpf would be a decent solution for anticheat. I believe you can limit what an ebpf program can look at quite effectively.

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