@SpiderUnderUrBed The true cheating is what is doing microsoft and closed source companies
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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I surely hope they never will, no user program should ever be allowed to run at kernel level, that's what malware does.
I personally avoid those kind of games, but those who won't can dual-boot.
Or...just don't play those games.
99% of their communities are more toxic than radioactive waste. And, they are not open source and they don't respect privacy. Because they are greedy.
All true. And yet, plenty of people do want to play those games. And there are other games (Borked) which also cannot be played no matter what. Really annoying, that.
Yeah, some people are just stubborn. By some i mean most. You gotta adapt, what do you think evolution's trying to tell you?
Same
I can't wait until I am able to give random programs kernel access on my system! That doesn't sound problematic in the least! After all, I have the fullest confidence that for companies developing anticheat, my security is their highest concern! /s
@phantomwise @SpiderUnderUrBed Every program on your system has "kernel access", it's called "syscalls", but actually being able to modify the kernel, that is another matter.
lol 🤣. Aren't you a tech guy?
He's just being pedantic.
Technically 'ls' has kernel access because it depends on system calls in order to produce its output.
System calls are the mechanisms through which programs request services from the Linux kernel, allowing them to perform tasks like file management, process control, and device management. Any program that's running on your machine has the access required to make syscalls and so you could say they have access to the kernel. They won't have kernel-level privileges, so they can't act as the kernel, but they do have access. Obviously the original user was referring to kernel anti-cheat modules which act as the kernel with all of the same privileges.
Short answer: no
Long answer: only the most important things should even have such low-level access to the system. A fucking game is not in that category. Nooooooo
Obligatory Fuck Denuvo. If I had virtually infinite money, I'd do a hostile takeover of Denuvo and burn it to the ground.
kernel level anti cheat is malware
abandon ranked, return to private lobbies
Every IT-literate person fights kernel-lvl malware disguising as games with everything they got.
Since Linux has a high percentage of those, I hope those "solutions" will never spread
From technical point of view it is possible. eBPF already has almost everything needed for doing that. And I think it can be done with a simple LKM but if they want it included in the main tree I'm sure they'll get some colorful email from Linus.
I really want to see that email.
I sure hope not. Play on someone else's pc if you want them to have control.
It's relatively trivial, you just need to write a kernel module. You'd just need/want to make it gpl so everything it does is fully audited and transparent. That's not a problem, is it? Right?
From a technical standpoint, you could argue that someone could create a fork of the kernel that spoofs the interface that the anticheat uses to make it ignore things. You can, of course, also do something similar in Windows, but security theatre never let practicality get in the way.
Doesn't Splitgate 2 have kernel level anti cheat that works on Linux? Maybe it is "trapped" inside wine/proton but they explicitly made it work and people are thanking them on steam discussions.
Helldivers 2 works (or at least used to when I played it) as well, while requiring kernel access on windows
No Wine/Proton cannot translate calls that run too deep into the Kernel
Couldn't it use some kind of partial kernel emulation to make kernel level anticheat think it's working?
No.
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).
On one side, I'm one of those glad for people coming to Linux because Linux is truly fantastic and it can make your life easier on many things, I'm happy for them.
On the other side, I share your concerns, because everything that gets adopted by the masses is inevitably subject to enshittification, I would never want that to happen to Linux.
We should find a sweet middle-point tho I have no idea what that would be.
I think the more people who aren't using corporate operating systems, the better.
I'm firmly against Microsoft, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.
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)
My point is you would either have to run those modules on Linux or not play the games. Which is the same as running them on Windows or not play the games with the exception that you'd lose the games that run on Linux with userland anticheat now.
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