Slashdot Mirror
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. :)
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
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
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"
That's right, the OS is actually MS's old friend OS/2 WARP.
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.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
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 = $FF
> Who, except for /. crowd, expects Microsoft adopts Linux for one of their strategic pieces?
> Windows has the HAL that can absorb hardware differences, so there's no room for Linux and the
> like.
When the Mac came out in '84, M$ told the DOS heads that using their keyboard macros was so much faster than using a mouse that using the mouse and gui will never make it into mainstream business. They published statistics to prove it. Then Windows came out, and M$ told them how great the mouse and gui was, and they switched over in droves, their past biases completely removed from their memory banks.
When the web started taking off in the early '90s, M$ told the faithful that the web was a waste of time. It was run by Universities and will never be applicable to the modern business world. Hell, you had to jump through hoops to even get windows running TCP/IP back then. Then M$ came out with IE, and told everyone that it is the business app of the future. All of the windows heads developed mass amnesia, and told us all how M$ runs the internet.
History says that if M$ changed their stance and started pushing Linux, embrased and extended into proprietary hell, of course, then all the current Linux haters will tell you how great M$ Linux is, and forget they ever bashed it.
M$s main power is brainwashing. They coddle the non-free-thinking masses and give them a sense of community in their M$ness. They will blindly follow whatever Redmond tells them, as long as they have Linux and Apple or whoever to despise. Hated is the easiest way to bind any community.
jfs
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
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.