A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
I hope devs will pay attention cause I certainly fucking do now!
I been playing Psychonauts 2 that is marked as "Playable" in Steam. And it is most certainly running better on Bazzite over Win11.
I have also tested CS2 on Bazzite yesterday and got around 120 FPS on Train while Win11 on Train was 80 FPS. I really can't believe this. With all the translation layers, Bazzite is really doing better than Windows.
You can keep your kernel-level shit off my CPU.
Spend money on servers. Verify your players. I don't care how you do it, but you don't get kernel-level access to my machine because some asshole script kiddies are aimbotting. You can never trust the client. This is basic shit that game devs will make up a whole host of bullshit to try to justify. (FWIW: I spent a solid decade as a professional game dev and I was as disappointed in this horseshit then as I am now. At least players are starting to figure it out now, too.)
Kernel level anticheat still can't detect all possible cheats, like Neuromuscular Aim Assist.
I love how the other players say they don’t consider it cheating.
That was hilarious watching his reactions to getting shocked XD
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.
Microsoft even sees it as a big mistake. They're creating APIs that won't require anti-cheat to be in the kernel like that. There shouldn't be any reason it needs to be in the Linux kernel.
That said, "don't trust the client" is a nice thing to say, but it's basically impossible to make games work like that. There are certain protocol design considerations that are needed for fps games to work in multiplayer with somewhat laggy connections, and they're not completely compatible with "don't trust the client". If we all had the fiber optic connections and IPv6 that we were promised in the 90s, things would be different. The wack-a-mole game against cheaters is the best that can be done otherwise.
What on earth would ipv6 have to do with it?
It can be routed more efficiently and has generally lower latency. Though how much it matters in practice is debatable, and real world data has fluctuated.
One thing it definitely enables is easier setup of home servers for games without NAT nonsense.
Kernel Level Anticheat needs to die. We have memory security, virtualization and antitampering features in operating systems now. All the games in Linux run in user space, none require system access because they are already sandboxed to an extent - every Wine/Proton game runs in a sandbox, since very older games often required admin permissions to run. Build your netcode with "never trust the client" as your first rule, E2E encrypt your network packets, learn to lag hide, and you'll eliminate 90 percent of the haxors.
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.
Just tell AAA game studios that AI can solve cheating server-side and they'll throw money at it.
I wonder if there have been any ML approaches to anti-cheat yet. I could actually see that making a ton of sense.
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).
That all reeks of effort though.
There's an interesting correlation between games that require kernel level Anti-Cheat and games whose community is toxic af.
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...
In case anyone thought it was a good idea from the article image:
Dont put goldfish next to your gaming rig, you'll cook it with the excess heat.
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.
RIP that one fish I had when I was 10/11
Is there a backstory for why you rate yourself out of 11 rather than 10?
Lmao, was intended to be a "or" symbol since memory is fuzzy and forgot the exact age I had the fish.
But um... I am Asian, so the scale is quite different from the standard scale. You know... "100 on a test? pfff, where is your extra credits, son?"
(okay maybe I exaggerated a little, but this is common in Asian families. I have talked to fellow Chinese-American classmates, and this is a thing, high grades are expectations. But I'm a failure so my parents already expect me to have bad grades lol)
DID YOU KNOW that the new skate game for EA has kernel-level anticheat that actively blocks Linux and Wine??
Yay please install shit in my kernel so I can skate yay
How about this:
There may be some places where a protocol-level solution is not feasible. In that case yeah, require your anti-cheat, but only for competitive game modes. I wouldn't even be pissed if they didn't allow it to run on Linux, Linux makes it easy to do whatever the fuck you want with your computer and so a determined cheater will find a way to cheat. It sucks, but I feel like a lot of people don't really care that much about sweaty competitive game modes anyway. Just give me a way to fool around with friends, it's not that serious FFS.
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?
is kernel level anti cheat even doing anything? or like can you still just go to some sketchy forum/ whatever and buy a cheat , or maybe even download one for free for these games
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.
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:
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.
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.
Oh man, I'd definitely install Linux if only there were kernel-level anti-cheat. That's been the only thing preventing me from switching.
What about devs removing kernel-level anticheat?
Definitely would be a positive outcome.
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 thought you were being facetious and joking lol
"I'd totally switch to Linux if I could install spyware into my kernel"
Money talks! I'm planning on buying it when launched.
We hope so too
No thanks, Valve. One reason I switched to Linux was a game ecosystem absent root-level surveillance software. There are many other, better ways to discourage cheating in games.
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.
Yeah that's a good point, on second read I see that the only mention of kernel-level anticheat made in the article were by the author, and nothing from the Valve rep themselves. Maybe I reacted too soon, and Valve is just trying to get devs warmed up to the idea of using better and less-intrusive anticheat systems.
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.