After watching some games on the live stream of the 2011 North American BattleNet Invitational I thought about returning to StartCraft 2 at least for some matches.
I started my SC2 installation and waited for various patches to be applied (Current version 1.3.6 ).
Unfortunately it dies even before showing the log in screen with:
ACCESS VIOLATION(0xC0000005)
Looking at the WineHQ App DB for SC2 I tried various options related to the simulated Windows Version, mmdevapi, pulseaudio, Direct3D registry settings, ...
Same error no matter what.
After poking around the web looking for the error message I luckily ran across https://sites.google.com/site/lightrush/random-1/howtomakestarcraftiinotcrashunderwineandubuntulucidmaverickonlogin
which sparked the idea of checking my gentoo-hardened kernel configuration regarding any ptrace restrictions.
linux # grep -i ptrace .config
CONFIG_GRKERNSEC_HARDEN_PTRACE=y
If you say Y here, TTY sniffers and other malicious monitoring programs implemented through ptrace will be defeated.
This option only affects the ability of non-root users to ptrace processes that are not a descendent of the ptracing process.
This means that strace ./binary and gdb ./binary will still work, but attaching to arbitrary processes will not.
I also read somewhere that SC2 uses the ptrace syscall to scan its own process for any hacks or modifications, so I disabled the according option:
Security options ---> Grsecurity ---> Executable Protections ---> Deter ptrace-based process snooping
recompiled and rebooted.
StarCraft 2 works like a charm again on my box!