Linux

Kernel level anticheat still can't detect all possible cheats, like Neuromuscular Aim Assist.

People say "kernel level" anticheat as if that would be necessary for some reason, but I don't really see it catching on in the linux world. Steam doesn't even have root normally. Even if it did, not everyone runs exactly the same linux kernel and the only practical way to distribute a module that's going to work for most people is through dkms, which means you build it from source, which means proprietary super-obfuscated shit is not going have its intended effect (assuming it ever does.)

There's nothing stopping them from doing all the same bullshit in userspace instead.

Build your netcode with "never trust the client" as your first rule

I wish this were more prevalent. Server side anti cheat is a problem that money can be thrown at and solved but its cheaper at face value to lease that labor from anti cheat service contracts.

We have memory security, virtualization and antitampering features

As someone who games entirely on Linux and wants multiplayer to work out, the features you're referring to are for keeping the application contained by the kernel, not the other way around. On a system where the user has full autonomy, no application should be able to know what is going on outside of its user space, and I don't want it to.

It'd be nice if it was a solved problem, but it's not. From consoles to phones to windows, currently the industry relies on you not having autonomy over your device for anti-cheat to work. Every other solution is either expensive (obfuscation arms race), or untenable (real time, high resolution server side validation of every property of every player).

Something about the kind of person who has such a need to prove their ability to shoot other people in a game that they're willing to give a corporation complete control over their home PC...

Interesting assessment. I always correlated anti cheat to "our enshittified game isn't selling as well as projected. It must be piracy and cheaters"

For that matter, don't put any fish at all in a tiny bowl of water, especially without a filter or heater. The common goldfish is meant to be very long-lived and gets fucking enormous if you don't torture it to death in a puddle of its own urine.

Got to protect users from someone doing script assisted kick flips

What about devs removing kernel-level anticheat?

I thought you were being facetious and joking lol

"I'd totally switch to Linux if I could install spyware into my kernel"

I've been running Linux for many years now and for those games that need it I reboot to Windows. It doesn't happen a lot. So many games just work on Linux, I just play those.

I think if you switched you would enjoy it so much more than Windows that you would prioritize Linux over the games with incompatible anticheats.

In due time though. Linux will always be available to you and eventually it will be suitable for your needs as well.

Casuals stop playing games when cheaters prevent them having fun, and it's the casuals they need to keep happy to keep their game alive.

IMO the answer is to internally maintain a "fun to play with" metric. It would be specific to the game, but each player's actions and interactions with other players would be evaluated to determine how "fun" they are to play with (might need to be multidimensional, since different players like having different types of interactions). It doesn't matter if they're cheating, or if they're just really good, or if they use cheesy strategies, etc, if the person isn't fun to play with, then match them with other people who are similarly unfun to play with.

This would cover your point that, if there's a cheater in the lobby, and their behavior somehow makes everyone have more fun, then who cares?

I'm not sure that is what they are advocating for. They have VAC which doesn't require kernel level access. If anything they will probably advocate this and that anti cheat can work without root level access.

As long as Valve is committed to an open system, without locked down bootloader like on mobile phones, it is unlikely that kernel-level anti-cheat can be implemented.

But that also means Steam Machines are unlikely to support 4K streaming from Nextflix and co. because also DRM will also only be on the level of other Linux systems.

Gta added it to remove linux players thinking they were the cheaters. Cheaters got around it the same day.

To answer your question, anti cheat is used to stop other operating systems from running their games, not cheaters.

It's an arms race, the arms just keep moving deeper into the stack system. Used to happen entirely in usermode, one process poking in and reading/writing memory of the game, so anti-cheat started keeping an eye out for malicious processes. Then at some point someone patched their kernel to cheat in a way the game couldn't possibly detect from usermode, so someone made an anti-cheat that ran at the kernel level too.

Modern KLA is basically a fully fledged rootkit, living in your system from boot, doing absolutely anything they can to try and make sure nothing has been tampered with. Validating signatures on bins, hooking memory mappings, watching for anything that might try to read/write the kernel or game's memory space unexpectedly.

Kernel-level anti-cheat can indeed be bypassed. I don't know which methods have been packaged up and made easy for just anyone to use, but when there's a demand, that's generally just a matter of time.

You might find this interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M

There is software that you can run on a Raspberry pi, you can set a second monitor HDMI output to the pi with HDMI input hat and feed your USB peripherals through the pi. It acts as an aim corrector, and also can take hints from the game output that can help show characters through walls, etc. External input devices have nothing to do with your kernel. Cheaters are going to cheat, kernel access is just a way that game makers can say they're trying to combat them without actually doing anything and exposing your kernel to third-party programs at the same time.

I run Linux, so I didn't really play any first person shooters that require kernel level access, and even if they were available I wouldn't install them on my system. I would really see the solution more as something to use as a layer on an immutable distribution instead of trying to give external software full access to the kernel on your system.