this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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No, because then you can just run software cheats at kernel level which would be completely undetectable to userspace anti cheat
So? I just want the games to run, I don't care about that side of it at all, that side of it is essentially pointless to me. There were always workarounds anyway, what does it matter?
Developers who use kernel anti-cheat don't support Linux because userspace anti-cheat is largely pointless. It doesn't matter if you personally don't care, the companies that want anti-cheat do care.
The workaround for kernel anti-cheat requires hundreds of USD in hardware. The workaround for userspace anti-cheat is entirely software.
Because of this, you will have less cheaters if cheating has a $500 price tag. That's why kernel anti-cheat is effective, there's no way for that to be solved with a WINE patch.
Is it actually effective tho?
It doesn't stop cheating, it just makes cheating require spending a few hundred dollars and dealing with complex hardware setups. This means that relatively few people try.
Non-kernel anti-cheat can be bypassed by software. So it's cheap and easily available.
That's the only difference. Kernel anti-cheat doesn't prevent cheating, it just makes it more expensive.
Can't you just use a virtual machine?
That would let you hide things from the kernel anti-cheat but the AC can detect that it is running in a VM and just won't let you play.
Is there really no such thing as a virtual machine that can't pretend to be real hardware?
The short answer is no.
There's a lot of study on this topic from the cybersecurity perspective. If you could create an undetectable virtualization layer then it would be used for real-world cyberattacks to steal money and the existence would be quickly noticed by security researchers (and future hardware would include changes to mitigate the vulnerability). It wouldn't be used for creating aimbots for video games.
If you want to read into the technical details, this stackoverflow thread has a lot of links to various papers and articles on the topic: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39533/how-to-identify-that-youre-running-under-a-vm