Comment by himata4113
1 day ago
Well actually I've been technically playing all the games that are protected by these aggressive anticheats on linux since I've decided to switch.
My setup is a custom version of the linux kernel that 'backdoors' itself and exposes host information to the windows vm making all the anticheats happy enough to work out of the box. Have not gotten banned in any of the games either. Custom VMM and EDK builds are required to block blanket detections of virtualized hardware.
I repurposed lookingglass to instead stream all the wdm buffers as seperate applications that I can open directly in linux like they're native applications. The neat part is that I forward all the installed applications to KRunner which talks to the windows vm and launches the application there and spawns a looking glass instance for that applications assigned path.
The only downside that this is a two GPU solution and you have to run any GPU intensive applications in windows.
If you have to run a Windows VM anyway, why not just reboot into Windows?
Because I would have to reboot into windows including any active applications I have? That also means I would have to maintain TWO operating systems instead of just one.
Now I have a form of WSL (LSW heh). There is a reason why everyone on windows uses WSL these days, same concept applies for LSW, but for games.
> Because I would have to reboot into windows including any active applications I have?
In a gaming-only setup, Windows requires virtually no maintenance. Plus gaming itself is a monotasking activity.
I actually find it positive having to reboot, so I start with a gaming session, and I only play, and when I'm done I'm done. I get the appeal of everything-in-Linux (it was my setup) but it's also a hassle.
Do you have anything on your LSW because i have a handful of software that i do not want to miss on Linux.
So you dont need to run Windows all the time, I guess?
I guess installing windows is more work than running a VM
... and more invasive
More work than using custom builds of everything on the Linux host?
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Care to write it up somewhere? Would be a fascinating read!
Unfortunately doing something like that will simply make anticheats respond as they have in the past and make it increasingly difficult to do so.
I did contemplate playing this cat and mouse game and making anticheats accept that it's easier to just support linux instead of fighting it.
With the Windows VM are you doing GPU pass through to get native performance? Is there still a relatively minimal overhead doing it that way? I would be interested in running applications in their own Windows VM(one at a time at least) but the VM is essentially invisible and only application window is available?
That is honestly amazing and impressive. Probably a bit too much tweaking for the common gamer though, but glad it is possible!
I've been messing with kernel-mode anticheats for 3 to 4 years so yah, not something a typical gamer can do. But I have been contempating on making this publically available for everyone to use wrapped in a neat little package!
Out of curiosity do you run the backdoored kernel in your day to day computing or only when gaming? Any concerns about incidental security issues?
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You definitely should! Even just a blog post about it would be great. I won't be doing it myself, but my son would for sure.