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The Scoop on the Xbox 360's Embedded OS?
An anonymous reader writes "When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each, WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, 'What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?' Now, the website thinks it has found the answer to its question. No, it's not Linux or BSD, nor a derivative of Longhorn or Windows CE."
What would you run on it? The XBox was cobbled together from basically off the shelf hardware. 4 years down the line, and we still haven't gotten everything working with Linux yet. The XBox 360 has NO OFF THE SHELF HARDWARE. You would need to reverse engineer the processor, graphics processor, RAM, filesystem, and system bus, not to mention audio, usb and IR controllers. I won't even go into the rights management system, which I imagine can only be stronger than on the original XBox (2048 bit encryption key needed to boot the XBox 1) Then you would have to write your own APIs and compilers for accessing said devices. I don't think the OS is the biggest problem in terms of hackability right now.
Seeing how the DevKits were G5 boxes, wouldn't it be a good idea to look at the OS they were running?
From a hackability POV, it's the BIOS that really matters. The original xbox had the BIOS hidden in the VGA chip (or was it the Southbridge? Can't remember) but once Bunnie Huang scoped the buses everything was lost. I think we can expect to see some fairly high grade encryption at work in both the POST and code signing arenas.
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I guess my point is : if the dev kits are using G4's PowerPC, does it make the console easier to crack ?
The OS is rather irrelevant when you're talking about embedded systems or for that matter, any system which just does its designed tasks with little direct human interaction.
... but let's be honest here. A lot of pretty darn important systems run on Windows, despite all the complaints about it being "insecure". There's a strong 3rd. party market happy to try to shore up those holes for a price - and plenty of customers willing to pay for those "improvements".)
... as long as it keeps running, people don't care what it runs.
That's why, as long as they keep on reading your ATM card and spitting out money properly, most people don't care a whole lot which OS their ATM machine runs.
The only reason we really have "OS wars" today is because people have differing opinions on the way things should be presented on the screen to them as an interactive user of said OS. (And secondarily, technical debates on such things as security
Most of the time, when someone expresses a strong preference for Mac OS X, they're really expressing a fondness for the overall look and feel of the GUI.... Perhaps they favor the drap and drop nature of everything, with file management being done by symbolic folders that automatically open up when you hold the mouse button down while pointing at one? Maybe OS X Tiger users just fell in love with the Dashboard widgets or the Spotlight search feature, or who knows?
Same with any other OS I can think of. Even MS-DOS users argued for it because of it's stark simplicity. "Only one exact way to do a specific task... no confusion of "What does the picture on my screen do that looks like *this*?" Easy to write down a step-by-step instruction sheet so anyone who can type can get a task done in it.
None of these things really matter on a system that nobody interfaces with directly very often. If it just serves up web pages or files or acts as a back-end to a database, or whatever
On the other hand...
OSX core is open source Darwin, which already runs on Intel processors. I would bet that deep inside Apple, they maintain a fully functional OSX on typical Wintel hardware (speculation only but why wouldn't Apple make the effort? Sort of a hedge against CPU lock-in).
I think a more interesting line of speculation is: Is Apple developing, or thinking of developing, an OSX version for the new CELL processor? After all, IBM surely thinks that CELL will eventually replace conventional CPUs. IBM and Apple usually work pretty close together when it comes to future CPUs for Apple's OS. I can't imagine that Apple hasn't at least discussed it with IBM.
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On the other hand, security has been a big thing with MS in the last few years. I'll rephrase that - managing public perception of security has been a big thing for MS lately. I can't imagine that they'd deliberately build in security flaws... well, not as a matter of marketing policy... well, I still don't believe it, anyway.
So that leaves the question as to whether they have learned enough from the original XBox to make XBox2 impossible to hack. I have problems with "impossible" in this context. The harder they lock it down, the harder they make it for partners to port to their platform. Since MS' in house games studios still lack the output to satisfy demand solo, they're somewhat dependant on goodwill to get ports of cool games from other platforms. And where they make those allowances, that's where the next generation of hacks will come.
The online game thing? Well yes, that's unavoidable. On the other hand, I think there's a backlash brewing against these subscription games. I'm old enough to remember the first wave of computer moderated play-by-mail games and they dirty tricks some of them used to extort money from the players once they had invested deeply enough. From what I've read of most of the MMOGs, it's the same sort of scam, and people seem to be becoming aware of that.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a fad. Just like video arcade games largely died off when home computers got good enough graphics to compete, so will the online ones when some free alternative gets good enough.
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