None of the things needed for a true kernel level anti cheat are in a translation layer, some of them just can’t be. It’s why games with actual kernel level anti cheat have never worked in proton and never will. Historically the only way to play those games is either be on windows or use a vfio virtual machine (which also probably won’t work even with tons of vm hiding techniques depends on just how sensitive the ac is). Wine/proton simply can’t translate the upper parts of the nt kernel needed for it.
It’s why games with actual kernel level anti cheat have never worked in proton and never will
Some games that use EAC, BattlEye and GameGuard, work fine in proton. Afaik, whatever these do and are abstracted to, or is offhanded to some linux native process, it’s still all running in userspace. I’m sure this relies on individual game developers playing along with it, and not 100% “proton emulating the nt kernel” in order to “fool them”. Is this the point you’re arguing? That it won’t be possible by a purely proton/wine translation layer?
If you know details on how exactly this works, or want to point to some resource on this, I’d be happy to read more about it.
My guess is that there is nothing technically impossible about fooling a rootkit by faking whatever syscalls from the game, but that it becomes a impossible task to maintain, as the AC developers can make minor changes that would require a lot of hard work to “emulate”. I’d love to learn more, but it was hard to find good resources on this.
EAC has an explicit linux support that valve worked on them with, it’s not full kernel AC. same with battleye and GG those are not full kernel root anti cheat implementations. I can’t point at any specific documents unfortunately but the wine/proton irc channels are public and lurking let’s you learn a lot as they talk through issues with games and anticheat.
In order for linux to support kernel level AC a module for the Linux kernel would be needed. And i doubt Linus will ever allow that lol
In order for linux to support kernel level AC a module for the Linux kernel would be needed. And i doubt Linus will ever allow that lol
This is… correct. That in order to support kernel level anti-cheat on Linux, you need a kernel module. But that statement is a tautology.
An NT kernel AC running through Wine, and whether or not it “works” doesn’t predicate on a Linux kernel module being loaded. All it needs is the correct handling of whatever the NT kernel would communicate to the running game, and handle whatever that callback is through some other mechanism that passes the checks.
Most AC software have Linux native clients, and that’s what this “some other mechanism”. And whatever that is in practice, should, with enough reverse engineering, be technically possible for proton/wine to do as well. It’s all running on userland after all. I assume that this is not an easy task to do at all, which is why the only realistic approach is for AC developers to actually be on board, and instead just compromise on the weaker level of anti-cheat protection, compared to what you’d get with a kernel module. As far as I understand, this is the case for GG, BattlEye and EAC. Not all games work, because it depends on the developers “allowing it”.
And as for what the future might bring. I expect that with Linux gaming becoming more popular, it’s only a matter of time before a Linux AC is implemented as a kernel module. Also, neither Linus, nor anyone, need to whitelist a kernel module for it to be loaded. The only one that has an ultimate say there is you, the user.
