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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."
It's Windows 2000. What a shock, who would've guessed, I'm so exci..... ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Will this compromise hackability?
DOS
What's next? Next thing you know Apple will start using Intel chips instead. Strange days. :)
Apple (Mac OS X) runs on PowerPC chips from IBM. But now they are planning to Intel platform. PC (windows) runs on Intel platform, but XBox 360 uses PowerPC. My question is simple. WHY???
fuvoo: watch something
How can they run an XBox on Windows 3.11?? I just don't get it... Will we be required to add TCP/IP on our own if we wish to play over the network?
I can go buy it in stores? I think you mean debuted.
All that fuss to say it's a simple derivative of NT, in its second generation of console-ness.
That was certainly a surprise. Oh wait, no it wasn't.
They are making the PowerPC for the Xbox and the Cell for the new Playstation. It seems like they will be the real winner in the next round of game wars.
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
The OS any machine runs is become irrelevant. I want a base OS that can run virtual machines and whatever runs on top as a Virtual OS doesn't really really matter. Similar to how Mac and OSX runs but without any legacy core that can interfere. With MS, they have the Virtual Machine on top of Windows yet if they made the Virtual Machine the OS and the run windows or whatever that would be the best of both worlds. Don't like Windows great it will run Linux, Symbian, Palm whatever and who cares lets just get the Virtual Machine running. Hm Sounds like Sun needs to extend Java to run Virtual Machines rather than running on an OS and that could complete a Virtual Machine.
I think it's interesting because, if W2K is good enough for the 360, the latest and greatest console in the world, it's still good enough for everyone else.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
My guess is faeries. They captured a whole mess of them and have chained them to tiny little switchboards in the machine. I was going to say leprachauns, but the extra gold they carry around would make the machines too heavy.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I was hoping it'd be something incredible and barely believable, like OS X or BeOS or Plan 9. But no, it's just a derivative of the original XBox OS. Weak. All that suspense for almost nothing. This story is worse than the ending of Citizen Kane, when "Rosebud" turned out to be his sled.
Another one bites the dust
I was hoping that it would have been a derivative of Mac OS X. Now that would have been a story worth reading (if true).
Could you imagine Microsoft getting in bed with Apple. ewww...
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.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
...so here's the article text:
.
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?"
We offered a few alternatives and called on our readers for their ideas on the subject. Now, we think we have the answer to our question.
But first, a bit of background.
As we stated in our previous story on this topic, the earlier Xbox (shown at right) was based on a Pentium-family processor and was said to run a variant of Windows 2000. But the new Xbox 360 has a completely different architecture, based on a custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor along with other specialty silicon including a custom graphics processor made by ATI, plus 512MB of system DRAM (see table of specs at the bottom of this article).
Since neither Windows XP nor Windows CE supports the PowerPC architecture (Windows hasn't supported PowerPC architecture since Windows NT 4.0 SP3), we devised the following set of alternatives for the Xbox 360's embedded OS:
A hitherto unpublicized port by Microsoft of Windows XP or Windows CE to the PowerPC
A version of some off-the-shelf embedded OS, possibly even a variant of BSD Unix or #%$@& (sorry, our censors deleted the "L-word")
A new embedded software platform developed specifically for Xbox use
And the OS is...
So, which is it -- choice 1, choice 2, or choice 3?
Our readers had some interesting comments, ranging from a derivative of the "yet to be released Longhorn" to "a ported Win XP kernel" to "its own private OS that was built from the ground up for gaming." And, to no one's surprise, nobody seemed to think Microsoft would embed BSD or "#%$@&" inside its Xbox!
We also asked fellow editor and ExtremeTech technology analyst Jason Cross (and self-described "certified geek") whether he had turned up anything about the Xbox's embedded OS while he was at E3 2005. There, we seem to have struck gold. "Yes," Cross replied, he had indeed uncovered some interesting tidbits in conversations with folks both inside and outside of Microsoft. Here's what he told us . .
The original Xbox ran an OS that had its roots in Windows 2000. Granted, by the time you strip out everything that is not needed in a console like the Xbox and replace some of the parts with stuff specific to that device (like the file system), and add a few pieces, it hardly resembles anything remotely like Windows 2000 at all. But you could say that's where its original roots lie, even if 95 percent of it has been cut or heavily altered.
The Xbox 360's OS, in turn, has its roots in the OS of the original Xbox. I've been told (not by Microsoft, but by one of its hardware partners) that the Xbox absolutely positively does NOT run Linux [oops, the censors missed that one --Ed.] or Unix or some variant of that. The Xbox 360 project started with the Xbox OS the same way the Xbox project started with Windows 2000. They cut, added, and changed it in both large and small ways. It's now quite a bit different from the Xbox OS, which was itself quite a bit different from Windows 2000.
Really, the best way to think of it is as "The Xbox 360 OS." But if you really have to think of it in Windows terms, you could say it has roots in Windows 2000 by way of the original Xbox, albeit with sweeping changes along the way.
So there you have it: the Xbox 360 reportedly runs a second-order derivative of Windows 2000 that has been ported to the custom triple-core IBM PowerPC processor. Well, that's what we think, anyhow.
Why does it matter?
Bear in mind, Microsoft has big plans for the home -- plans that include media center PCs, family entertainment centers, TV set-top boxes, portable media players, mobile phones, and, of course, gaming devices.
Considering that the Xbox 360 represents a powerful new computing platform that will be finding
Site was dead for me, so Coral Link.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
And everyone else is using it, too. W2K is NT 5.0. XP is NT 5.1.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
As anyone with a passion for other and more esoteric platforms will (or should) know.
Windows NT existed on a number of different architectures other than Intel x86, Including MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC, in versions 3.5 3.51 and 4.0.
The final point to make is that when the work began on Windows 2000, the entire OS was done. The full NT5 beta available from the MSDN when it was released. Did indeed include a PowerPC version as well as the others. ( at least one beta did as far as i can confirm from my discourses with other "wisened veterans" (no mater what their age) of the MS oses. )
The effort involved in MS porting the NT 5 kernel and other systems to the Xbox 360 would have been totaly comparable to the effort needed to strip and optimise the nt 5 core for the Xbox. Which is in fact a very impressive degree of refinement over the original os when you examine the finer details.
( My other boxes are FreeBSD and Solaris so dont dare call me a MS fan, XP is for my games only case wine isnt good enough and i pray it catches up sooner. )
XML - A clever joke would be here if
The obvious answer hasn't been mentioned yet: OS\360 (especially since it is running on an IBM processor).
"The original Xbox ran an OS that had its roots in Windows 2000. Granted, by the time you strip out everything that is not needed in a console like the Xbox and replace some of the parts with stuff specific to that device (like the file system), and add a few pieces, it hardly resembles anything remotely like Windows 2000 at all. "
So, in other words, it runs DOS 5.1
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
That's right, the OS is actually MS's old friend OS/2 WARP.
Who, except for /. crowd, expects Microsoft adopts Linux for one of their strategic pieces? Windows has the HAL that can absorb hardware differences, so there's no room for Linux and the like.
> Thanks for spoiling the ending of the movie for those of us that haven't had a chance to see it yet.
The movie came out in 1941 for God's sake! How long do you expect everyone to tiptoe around you?
Oh, and the Planet of the Apes is the future Earth.
Bruce Willis? Dead.
Kaiser Sose? Verbal.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
The original XBox ran NT Embedded using the NT5 kernel. The new XBox runs NT Embedded using the NT5 kernel. Why is this a surprise?
It's Power PC? So? They had a Power PC NT kernel, for the CHRP motherboards, and most of the NT kernel is C and C++ and has to be portable at least to Alpha and Itanium, so building most of it for Power PC would be just a recompile. It's not like the software just vanished when the CHRP 'market' collapsed.
Didn't MS and billg say that stripping down the OS like this was impossible due to integration issues in a court of law? Did someone mislead the court? Or am I mistaken?
Anyway, this is just one more project branch to maintain. They now have Win2K, WinXP Home Edition, WinXP Pro, Win2003 server, WinCE and now another version for the XBox. For the server editions they need to support standard, enterprise and data center versions. And I think there is a version for the tablet PC, or is it just WinCE? No wonder MS wants cheaper code monkeys, keeping all the versions maintained and in synch has got to be a labor intensive nightmare.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
First off, it was pretty obvious that MS were going to use existing code on the original XBOX, if only because it was to all intents and puropses a PC. So at the time MS had the choice between using a Win 9X codebase, a CE codebase or NT/2000 codebase.
.NET or Avalon.
Windows 9X compatibility wasn't a requirement so could be ignored, CE was optimised for lower power CPUs and had been a less than a stellar success in the Dreamcast, whilst the NT/2000 codebase was optimised for higher end processors x86/PPC/MIPS/Alpha. It would seem that the choice was obvious. I dare say that MS stripped it down so that it's just the kernel of 2000 with thin wrappers of DirectX on top of the drivers together with a the minimum requirements of Win32 to keep DirectX and OpenGL running.
If we jump ahead to now, it seems obvious that MS would carry on using the same platform - just this time using the PPC branch of 2000, build new drivers and probably add more Win32 stuff to support the XNA architecture. If anything it seems unthinkable that they would use anything but an NT kernel.
I would be more interested to know if Win360 (I know this is Slashdot and Microsoft is only interesting when it's monopolising the cure for cancer etc - but just allow me to wonder a moment!) supports
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
The GC is still not sold at a loss, the PS3's video is from ATI, not nVidia, and Sega did make money on consoles at one point. Then they decided to release 3 or 4 consoles nobody wants per year, that is what put them where they are now.
And slashdot sucks for putting in captchas for logged in users.
Just because MS doesn't have a monopoly in every single market (yet), doesn't mean they don't have a monopoly. The problem with the xbox is that they are using the billions of dollars they made from their OS monopoly to push their way into other markets.
Whaddya mean "3 for 3"? As we all know, the Phantom is running on commodity x86 hardware! It'll be out any day now with a vast library of games, really...
I'm not sure about that. The introduction of an XBox Live Silver tier (read: free) service is so that they can get hoards of gamers gaming online.
Modding your X-Box going forward isn't going to be much of an issue for Microsoft. You can't use X-Box Live with a modded XBox and Microsoft wants to ensure that everyone is online. So all their games with be Live enabled. Microsoft is going to use Live to distribute levels and authenticate games, even if you're not playing online at the time. Modding your XBox to pirate games will make it useless. Media-Center mods? Well, Microsoft already supports that for XB1. To that end, there's no need to dissuade would-be modders. Ancillary mods, like upgrades to video cards, etc.. will most likely be supported by Microsoft, and they'll benefit from the secondary market that arises because of it. There's just no need for obfuscation as far as an OS is concerned.
By the time XBox 720 debuts, we won't be buying discs anymore. We'll be downloading our games onto our 2TB hard drives. Oh, the Xbox 720 will have nine cores instead of the three it has now, and the extra cores will run the thin clients and tablets on the local network. It will be backwards compatible with all previous XBox games, but since there likely won't be a media drive, you'll need the "Classic" subscription (several tiers, of course) in order to play them. Oh yeah, and they would have nicely sidestepped the death of the PC in the first world.
If you think they're evil now... *shrugs*
I'm gonna buy a Nintendo Revolution.
un burrito me trampeó.
Cross financing is one thing, dumping below cost is another. It's illegal in the US but only if the govt is brave enough to go after a large donor.
evil is as evil does
And I explained clearly that MS has a monopoly in the PC OS market. Then I complained that they are using that to try to take over another market. I didn't say that's what makes them have a monopoly, I said they already have the monopoly, and are now abusing it to push into other markets.
And you certainly could say that about sony, if they had sold the playstation or ps2 for a loss, but they didn't
It's Xbox360, which was Xbox, which was Windows 2000, which was Windows NT, which was... VMS. How many VAXMIPS does the X360 run? And where's my DCL interpreter?
--
make install -not war
come on now. that will absolutely NOT dissuade modders entirely. i mean think of all the people who went out and bought xboxes just to destroy them in an effort to say... hmmm... run linux on it. every new release of any device capable of running an OS has dozens of hackers taking pics of its internals on the day of release. people like modding things, period. why? just because they can...
it will take them a while to circumvent future xbox live problems. but they will beat it in time. that is assured. as soon as MS releases new patches into the games there will be a whole community devoted to re-releasing via net some new code to allow them to play their games again.
your ancillary mod theory is out too in my opinion. MS has never been much into the hardware aspect of what they do. peripherals is another story. but i highly doubt MS would want to open that can of worms. they would never officially support it. that would mean they would have to work extra hardware support into their embedded OS. a console "works" because it has one known set of hardware. homogeneity is why consoles exist and havent been eaten up by the pc. all games have to just be able to play nice with that one set of hardware. if it works on one, it should work on the next. if hardware upgrades of that nature caught on it would be a console makers nightmare. not to mention all the kiddies [and broke parents] that would be mad first thing xmas morning to find out that halo 4 needs a new video card upgrade for their xbox.
so the question is... why would anyone want to mod the xbox in the first place since MS is now providing us with the functionality that we wanted in the first place. the answer is simple. because we can! if they say we cant do x, y, or z... we find a way to prove them wrong. its human [read: hacker] nature. some people just want the ability to run linux on this three processor system that should be faster than their current desktops. some people may want to change the layout/colors of their GUI [in their OWN way, not just using the choices MS presents us]. the faceplate idea is okay, but what about changing the sides? i want a completely black console... and they better sell blank faceplates.
some people may use future mods for warez. which of course is very illegal. i dont see that community going away anytime soon. but, on the legal loophole side of things where most modders live, some people may just want to play with their friends online during the weekdays without paying extra for it. seems legal enough to me since paying for a live subscription is just to cover the maintenance of the live servers. if you werent forced to use the live servers to play, you shouldnt have to pay. i mean if i had a lan party and no subscription to xbox live, would i have to wait until the weekend to play? no [well, i hope not], because im not using MS servers. well, what if i want to host a LAN party via internet tunnelling? hmmm...
the modding community isnt going anywhere, and MS should be grateful for it [some of it anyways] it drives alot of sales. as an enduser i will buy the console that has the most value, the most options and the best games. many mods have made the original xbox a decent value. i dont think the console makers should be as heavy handed as they have been, but they are just trying to protect the bottom dollar; i cant blame them from a business standpoint.
I just want to know how long will it take an XBox 360 to get MacOSX running on it. That would be a ton better than a mac mini.
Nowhere does it claim that the PS2 was cheaper than a DVD player, BECAUSE ITS NOT TRUE. Just that people over 30 bought it *mostly* for movies, and that DVD players were more expensive in japan than the states. See, people bought it because it wasn't much more expensive than a DVD player they would have bought anyways, and they could still play the occasional game on it.
And if you read the article you posted, the doom and gloom predictions were because the PS2 didn't have much for games at launch, and there were component shortages so they couldn't produce as many as they wanted. They made money on PS2s, and wanted to make more but couldn't because they couldn't make enough of them.
And of course the 4 games is a random number that was chosen for that particular rumor, which was about the xbox. What does the article have to do with anything, it doesn't mention this rumor. People claimed various things about how much MS was losing per xbox, but the fact is they never said how much they lose, just that it loses money, therefore its a rumor.
No, my post said that using the money from their monopoly in the OS market to sell a product at a loss in another market is the problem. Read it, that really is what it says, and everyone who can read english can see this, including you.
Being too fucking dense to read what you are replying to is bad enough, but being so arrogant as to pretend you are being ignored because you aren't participating in group think is beyond rediculous. Wake up, nobody wants to try to converse with someone who will only ignore what they say and continue arguing with straw men and red herrings.
You decided based on your own twisted view of the world that I am some anti-MS crusader. This is obvious from you complaining about "people like me" using a dollar sign in MS, despite me not doing that, and telling me to complain about Sony, when Sony isn't doing what MS is.
And just so you know, I hate Sony. They have a hidden control panel in their monitors (at least some models) that you can only access using a special cable and special software, which of course only sony authorized repair centers can get. So if there is a power surge and your monitors contrast gets set WAY too high (above what you can even set with the user control panel) then you have to pay $250 for some overpaid fuckstick to plug in a cable and press "reset to factory settings" on this gay software. While I am not a huge fan of MS, because of this monitor scam I outright despise Sony.
But that doesn't change the fact that MS is a convicted monopolist using money from a monopoly that has held PC technology back for years to push their way into a new market with a product that loses money. Why would you expect everyone to be complaining about Sony when they aren't doing this, and MS is?
If you don't believe me, just pop a Konsole on it and type "uname -a"; there it is, right in front of you:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing