// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
These Open Source Devs Are Reverse-Engineering Xbox Game Pass for Linux
Xbox Game Pass has never really worked on Linux beyond laggy cloud streaming, but an open source project called Xodus is trying to change that.
Earlier this week, replying to a thread on Reddit, Paweł Lidwin (imLinguin), project lead of Xodus, confirmed that the hardest parts of running those games on Linux, Xbox authentication, and game downloads are already working.
The project is attempting to reverse engineer Xbox's entire authentication, licensing, and delivery pipeline well enough to run Xbox on PC and Game Pass titles on Linux.
Xodus describes itself as "the great gaming migration to Linux," while cautioning people that it is not endorsed by Microsoft and using it comes with risks. You see, modern Xbox PC games run on Microsoft's Game Development Kit, or GDK, and ship as encrypted MSIXVC packages.
Getting a game running on Linux means handling both.
The project's GitHub page currently houses a handful of repositories that include the main xodus client written in Rust, a forked ntfs library for reading MSIXVC, and xgameruntime, an open source implementation of xgameruntime.dll built for use in Wine.
A companion repo, xgameruntime-docs, documents how that same DLL works internally.
There's also forked copies of Wine and Proton, maintained by the Xodus team, featuring custom tweaks, and xal-rs, an Xbox authentication library forked from OpenXbox.
Keep in mind that there are no binaries available for you to play around with just yet; there's still a lot of work to be done.
So yeah, a First Look at Xodus is still months away. 😆