I’m not finding any information online other than that it’s difficult
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WINE Is Not an Emulator (that’s what the acronym actually stands for).
At a program level, WINE creates a dummy Windows directory structure, slaps files where an exe expects them, and executes the program.
EXEs (well, all programs) will use system calls to request resources (ie. files, access to hardware like GPUs, data from other processes) which Windows maps to certain areas of memory and has its own protocols for how to handle requests. Linux has its own protocols and methods that are incompatible, hence why Windows and Linux apps can’t run natively together.
Then the magic happens: WINE maps these requests to Linux requests so that the running program is none the wiser. It asks for GPU resources like a Windows app would, then gets those resources back just like a Windows app would expect. There are thousands of edge cases, hundreds of system calls, and a bunch else that complicates things but that’s how WINE (and Proton) works.
The reason this fucks up Kernel-level anticheat is that it isn’t trying to communicate via these established channels. They usually operate with full resources outside of the jurisdiction of your OS, and scan your memory bit-by-bit rather than asking the OS politely via system calls for info on other processes.
With WINE, whilst a typical application will not notice the differences they’re designed to not throw a fit if your underlying OS is configured differently, a kernel anticheat will not even recognise the system as a valid OS even if it was able to run in the first place.
The solution here is systems like EasyAC that give up the benefits of being able to analyse processes at the kernel level in favour of portability. Another potential solution (though unlikely imo) is a cross-platform kernel anticheat protocol, that all major operating systems agree to implement, similar to how operating systems will implement the TCP/IP protocol to communicate across networks regardless of underlying OS.
Now the reason "WINE"s acronym is particularly important is that if it DID emulate windows, as in what most virtual machine providers do, then anticheat would be running in an environment mapped out like a real Windows install - because it is. This is how many Linux gamers prefer to run certain titles, and something that should always be functional. It is much more annoying to maintain, However - balance how much you really wanna play the latest COD with your willingness to debug GPU passthrough shit.
Good read, what if they just want the games to run and don’t care about functional anticheat? Couldn’t they send fake info to the anticheats, or do you think that would be technically impossible?
Short answer: Yep, cheat softwares regularly do this too, but it’s costly and prone to being immediately patched, and it’s potentially illegal.
Anticheat systems are designed around this since a cheat client would try to do exactly that. One way for example is for the anticheat to provide a cryptographic key to the game which it uses to prove to a multiplayer server that the anticheat is functioning and untampered with. Even if you bypass anticheat locally, you still have to prove that the game client is legitimate to the server. This does happen! But kernel anticheats are much harder to access and tamper with, and in our case of using WINE are unlikely to even work from the outset.
So okay, let’s hypothetically bypass anticheat locally. We modify the game to tell the server it’s legit, and it works! A few days later the game gets patched, and suddenly our bypass is defunct. For cheat sellers this part of the cost of business but for people just trying to game on Linux there’s little money in it, and if there is it won’t ever be spent on circumventing anticheat (which also falls under some legal grey areas if not outright illegal depending on your country).
Given enough time and resources we could probably find some novel way to crack anticheat on a game as such as it becomes playable on Linux. But it’s so much easier to use that effort somewhere else or just use a Windows VM that is guaranteed to work even if slightly slower.
Yes, we are waiting for the CrowdStrike aha moment where the industry learns the hard way that anticheat with root privileges was a dangerous idea not worth the risks.
No, forget anticheat games. It’s not possible to create a “fake” rootkit. If it was possible, they would have done it for Windows too, and it would defeat the purpose of anti-cheat. So, just don’t run these games. They don’t worth your security.
I mean I wouldn’t mind defeating the purpose of anticheat. Let’s all defeat the purpose of anticheat.
User space level anticheat yes,kernel anticheat no and I actually happy about ,kernel level anticheat behaving literally like malware/rootkit
Kernel level anticheat that thinks it’s kernel level and runs in userspace is the best of both worlds though, is it not?
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?
At that point you might as well not have a kernel level anti cheat and companies who insist on kernel level anti cheat will block wine. The only solutions I see are
- Developers mainly use server side anti cheat
- They make native Linux games
- Distros provide a way to ensure a untainted (signed) kernel
That would be a massive win in my book, kernel level anticheat is malware.
make it so that they can’t block wine without blocking windows and kernel level anticheat is gone
There’s plenty of single-player games that don’t use any sort of anticheat you can play and that work fine on WINE and Proton.
Only anticheat that doesn’t nest itself very deep into the windows kernel.
Will wine ever be able to run antiCheat.
I hope not. I switched to Linux to get away from malware and spyware.
Did you know that most big anti cheat systems actually do run in Wine when allowed to by the developer?
Yeah but that doesn’t count tbh, if the dev has to give the okay we lose a ton of games, and that isn’t what I’m looking for, the dev shouldn’t be able to know it isn’t running on windows
You can’t lose what you never had, though. ;-)
