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sseneca | 4 years ago

> Some game companies (riot games) even install their anti-cheat software so that is loads in the ring 0 space.

Why are separate machines required, rather than dual-booting? (i.e. Windows for games, Linux for everything else)

discuss

zionic|4 years ago

Because Linux and windows bootloaders routinely screw with each other. I am NEVER losing another weekend to that crap again. Dedicated windows gaming PC is the correct way to deal with this.

0xbkt|4 years ago

With a UEFI-GPT setup two ESPs (one for each OS) and you're good. Now that I have no software bootloaders, which need to know about multiple OSs, I only need to use BIOS' own boot device selector on startup.

andoriyu|4 years ago

That's not the case for a long time. I have rEFInd that started life in windows 7 esp with freebsd dual booting, now the same hard-drive booting windows 10 (upgraded from 7, not fresh installation) and nixos, all with the same rEFInd from the same.

The correct way to do so, is to have separate hard-drives for different OS. Then there is zero chance of them stepping on each other.

flowless|4 years ago

You can also run virtual machine with real card attached to it via VFIO if your host has IOMMU support. Guess what this means for anti-cheat.

sseneca|4 years ago

As the other user said, BattleEye now bans for this. I used a VFIO set up for a number of years but had to switch because of it.

120391583|4 years ago

Some anti-cheats like BattlEye try to detect if they're running in a VM.

pstrateman|4 years ago

Your computer is really a bunch of computers pretending to be a single computer.

Most of the components have firmware that can itself be loaded with malware.

sseneca|4 years ago

Ah. So, if a Windows application runs in ring 0, it can put malware in a place such that it can then interact with the Linux install?

Is there _any_ way to bypass this, apart from separate machines? I didn't know this was possible.