Summary of “Anti Cheat at Embark Studios” prensentation by Embark Studios Senior Software Engineer Tom van Dijck, at devcom in Germany on August 24.
… Linux presents an even worse situation. Because users can custom-build the OS kernel, embedding a cheat directly into the kernel and compiling it makes it nearly impossible for a game to detect its existence. “How do you detect that?” van Dijck asked, adding that while support for SteamOS and Proton will remain, platform requirements will become stricter.
Though he mentions anti-cheat on Linux being more challenging to implement that on Windows, he doesn’t seem to think that it’s impossible. He goes on to talk about “undetectable” cheating hardware becoming cheaper, which sounds like a bigger problem, but he sounds optimistic about being able to detect those as well.
IMO “platform requirements will become stricter” could mean something like only allowing signed kernels with anti-cheat module built in + secure boot.
The Nvidia driver doesn’t require rebuilding the kernel, just a kernel module.
I certainly do hope they don’t end up with a solution that shuts out common kernel modules like Nvidia, VirtualBox or ZFS. There’s no way they’re gonna make an anti-cheat that blocks the Nvidia driver though, that wouldn’t make any sense.
The bigger worry IMHO is around what distros it will work on. If they disallow user-compiled kernels, they’ll inherently have to only support specific distros (and derivatives which uses the same kernel), so I hope they’d allow all the common distros like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, OpenSUSE and derivatives of these. I don’t want to end up with these games being blocked by anti-cheat from working on anything but SteamOS and maybe Ubuntu.
The best to hope for would probably be if they can design it so it works anything where Microsoft has provided a Secure Boot certificate, so it will work on any distro that currently supports Secure Boot.