[ThrowawayR2]

> "The biggest problem is anti cheat software. As soon as they figure that out it’ll get a lot higher!"

Doesn't "figure it out" likely mean rather invasive and user hostile kernel module(s) to prevent cheating? Because the alternative is that Linux becomes the preferred OS for cheaters and the game makers redouble their efforts to detect it; Valve's interests in promoting Linux are not necessarily aligned with studios' interests in promoting a cheater free experience.

[ryandrake]

Call me an optimist, but "figure that out" could mean game developers stepping up and fixing their games to be more intrinsically robust to cheating. It seems kind of nuts to me that so much development effort has been poured into invasive software that invades the kernel, scans memory, reads the list of running processes, etc. rather than the (admittedly also hard) problem of designing games such that cheat software doesn't work as well.

Reminds me of a company I worked for as a junior dev, not gaming related, where our bread and butter application was hopelessly full of crash bugs, to the point where you couldn't even run it for more than an hour or so continuously without it crashing. Instead of investing in the effort needed to fix the crashers, they instructed me to create a separate "launcher" application that stays resident, waiting for the application to crash, and then re-launching it saving as much state as possible. It felt bonkers to me but I guess it made sense to somebody.

[higherhalf]

I was wondering if memfd_secret [1] could be a part of a solution to this problem. Sounds like it. Of course, it'd require a recent kernel version, which is an obstacle.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/865256/

[bscphil]

Given that Steam OS is going to be (already is?) built on top of Arch Linux, and supposing that most Steam games that are "Linux compatible" are going to be targeting that as a base platform, this might not be as big of an obstacle as you think (provided Steam plans to keep the OS up to date).

[phendrenad2]

memfd_secret won't help. It only protects memory from being accidentally leaked by the kernel due to an unknown bug. The cheater could easily recompile their kernel to make memfd_secret do nothing.

[thioordc]

Could mean that. I was just commenting that most of the games that don’t work are from anti cheat or some kind of online multiplayer issue.