Microsoft has long wanted to get vendors out of the kernel. It’s a huge privacy/security/stability risk, and causes major issues like the Crowdstrike outage.
Most of those issues also apply to kernel anti-cheat as well, and it’s likely that Microsoft will also attempt to move anti-cheat vendors out of kernel space. The biggest gaming issues with steamOS/Linux are kernel anti-cheat not working, so this could be huge for having full compatibility of multiplayer games on Linux.
What do you mean? Take away your ability to create drivers? Because it’s already extremely limited and you need to get signed. I guess this “change” would just mean not signing any new antivirus drivers.
That’s a completely wrong take. Whether or not an anticheat runs in the kernel or not does not mean people can just go and edit their files. Even with a kernel level anticheat people can already do that if the driver is not running. The correct way is to do purity checks during connection to an online server, and only allow serverside code to update the gamestate. Any texture file hacks and local purity bypasses for those would need to be caught by the userland anticheat, like it has been done for ages. Not the best solution, but far more privacy friendly.
Another weird take. Are you talking about the anticheat not being installable anymore? Because even if a game comes with a kernel level anticheat it would need a valid certificate, so any dead game would eventually have this problem regardless of it being allowed to install the driver. Porting games would in almost all cases get rid of the anticheat or somehow null it, disable any custom servers from forcing a valid anticheat, stuff like that. And archiving would be much easier without any anticheat at all, again regardless of kernel anticheat or userland anticheat.
MUCH better solutions against hacker are to use all this amazing machine learning stuff on the server side, put more power back into the hands of admins and their selfhosted servers, and handle reports about hackers better and faster.
Thanks for the well thought response, you made quite a few points, but let me try to clarify where I’m coming from:
Windows 11 requires all computers to have TPM 2.0. It’s a crypto chip used for allowing vendors (re: Microsoft) to add secure keys at a hardware level, which will then allow software to verify that the software, operating system, and hardware are “unmodified”.
In a nutshell this process for allowing software to ensure that the OS and hardware are not compromised nor modified is called “attestation”.
And it’s something Google has (successfully) introduced into Android and they’re now “turning the screws” .
This means that the Windows of the near future, will begin to “limit access” to the OS (ie: kick people out of the kernel), only allowed signed device drivers, etc.
The next step will be restricting “sideloaded apps” and funnel people through the “officially supported apps store”. Once that happens, sideloading will either be removed or crippled.
When it comes to gaming: there won’t be any need for anti-cheat measures, because Microsoft will know (and will disable itself or the app) if you’ve modified the OS or any app/game (this could include installing a game on a newer or older version of Windows)
This is the future of computing. It’s already happening to cellphones. I’d read a great article (that I, sadly, cannot find) that talks about how technology like attestation have software vendors treat the user as an untrustworthy person. The upshot, for the user, is that if they get infected will malware or a virus the OS will know and will react accordingly. The downside, for the user, is that the freedom we have today - to install or configure our OS to our liking will be a thing of the past.
These changes won’t happen overnight, but it has and will be a slow boil.
I think that’s a very big stretch and I don’t think we’ll see that any time soon. Microsoft is already losing market share and they can’t do much more of this type of stuff because more and more people are getting annoyed. (Including ones with a following such as PewDiePie)
Anyways, Linux is great.