[LaGrange]

Hear me out:

Containers. Or even just go full VM.

AFAIK we have all the pieces to make those approaches work _just fine_ - GPU virtualization, ways to dynamically share memory etc.

It's a bit nuts, sure, and a bit wasteful - but it'd let you have a predictable binary environment for basically forever, as well as a fairly well defined "interface" layer between the actual hardware and the machine context. You could even accommodate shenanigans such as Aurora 4X's demand to have a specific decimal separator.

We could even achieve a degree of middle-ground with the kernel anti-cheat secure boot crowd - running a minimal (and thus easy to independently audit) VM host at boot. I'd still kinda hate it, but less than having actual rootkits in the "main" kernel. It would still need some sort of "confirmation of non-tampering" from the compositor, but it _should_ be possible, especially if the companies wanting that sort of stuff were willing to foot the bill (haha). And, on top of that, a VM would make it less likely for vulnerabilities of the anti-cheat to spread into the OS I care about (a'la the Dark Souls exploit).

So kinda like Flatpak, I guess, but more.

[Rohansi]

Check out the Steam Linux Runtime. You can develop games to run natively on Linux in a container already.

Running the anti-cheat in a VM completely defeats the point. That's actually what cheaters would prefer because they can manipulate the VM from the host without the anti-cheat detecting it.

[revanx_]

There is no "real" GPU virtualization available for regular consumer, as both AMD and NVIDIA are gatekeeping it for their server oriented gpus. This is the same story with Intel gatekeeping ECC ram for decades.

Even if you run games in container you still need to expose the DRM char/block device if you want vulkan,opengl to actually work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPU_virtualization#mediated

[1313ed01]

I try to get as many (mostly older, 2D) Windows games as possible to run in QEMU (VirtualBox in the past). Not many work, but those that do just keep working and I expect they will just always work ("always" relative to my lifetime).

WINE and Proton seems to always require hand holding and leaks dependencies on things installed on the host OS as well as dependencies on actual hardware. Used it for decades and it is great, but can never just relax and know that since a game runs now it will always run like is possible with a full VM (or with DOSBox, for older games).

[whatevaa]

GPU sharing for consumers is available only as full passtrough, no sharing. Have to detach from host.

[froggit]

MS has supported doing gpu virtualization for years in hyper-v with their gpu-pv implementation. Normally it gets used automatically by windows to do gpu acceleration in windows sandbox and WSL2, however it can be used with VMs via powershell.

[throwaway48476]

12th gen and later intel iGPU can do sr-iov.