Epic says a Steam Deck cannot run its new Linux anti-cheat, and it is talking to Valve
Epic’s rebuilt Linux anti-cheat will not run on a Steam Deck, and Epic says it has taken that up with Valve. "The Steam Deck does not support the required features for our EAC v2 solution, but we are actively talking with Valve and hope to support it in the future," Epic says in a post dated October 14.
Epic published the Easy Anti-Cheat Linux v2 details on its own developer site on October 14. Image: Epic Games
Epic calls the rebuild EAC Linux v2 and says it will "bring the level of protection much closer to par with Windows, in the very near-term". Fortnite is the test case: Epic says it is "planning to pilot EAC Linux v2 in Fortnite first" and will open it to other developers once it has "validated EAC v2’s effectiveness".
Epic blames its own Linux build for Fortnite’s absence
Easy Anti-Cheat has supported native Linux clients since 2014, and since 2021 it has also covered Windows builds running through Wine or Proton. Epic says that second route is opt-in per game and that "many haven’t opted in because our Linux implementation couldn’t offer the same level of protection as our Windows implementation".
Epic ties the game to that gap directly: "This is why Fortnite isn’t available on Linux yet, but it’s coming." No date is attached to the game, the pilot or the rebuild.
Linux owners meet that wall regularly. For Honor went dormant on SteamOS when Ubisoft blocked the platform, and Respawn told Apex Legends players to launch through Steam after its own anti-cheat change in September.
Epic wants Secure Boot and TPM 2.0, but no kernel module
Epic lists eight system requirements and says it expects to iterate on them:
- a kernel signed with a well-known key, and any kernel modules signed the same way
- TPM 2.0 present and enabled in the BIOS
- Secure Boot enabled, booting only from well-known keys
- measured boot, which Epic says systemd-boot and GRUB usually do by default
- IOMMU enabled with passthrough disabled, which Epic requires "for non-handheld devices"
- kernel lockdown integrity mode explicitly enabled at boot
- kexec explicitly disabled at boot
- the BPF Linux Security Module loaded and active
On Windows, Epic says, it relies "heavily on a kernel driver". On Linux it says it will not: asked directly whether EAC Linux v2 uses one, Epic answers "No. EAC Linux v2 does not install or load an anti-cheat kernel module." What installs instead is "an anti-cheat systemd service" plus eBPF programs, and Epic says the service "only starts when a protected game starts and it stops when the game exits".
Failing the checks is not a ban. Epic says a player who starts a protected game on a machine that does not qualify "will just see an error message", and suggests keeping a separate boot entry with the required kernel and command line for the times you want to play one.
Nine signing keys are on the list, Bazzite’s included
EAC Linux v2 checks the key that signed the boot chain against what Epic calls a well-known list, and Epic has published the current nine: Canonical, Fedora, Universal Blue, Debian, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Rocky Linux, the Microsoft UEFI CA and AlmaLinux. Universal Blue is the entry that covers Bazzite, Bluefin and Aurora, and Epic’s own note names all three.
Epic says it will maintain the list "to start", wants to make it open source and will take community pull requests to expand it, and asks distribution maintainers to write to [email protected]. Later this year it will co-host a panel with Jef Spaleta, the Fedora Project Leader, and Epic gives no date for that either.
Developers already using the old Linux implementation get a choice rather than a migration: Epic says they can stay on it "for maximum compatibility" or move to v2 "for better cheat protection".
Epic’s answer for the Steam Deck, then, is a conversation with Valve and no date. The post puts it as continuing "the Easy Anti-Cheat team’s open line of communications with Valve to support Steam Hardware devices to the maximum extent technically possible", and the Deck is the only piece of hardware Epic names as unsupported.
