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PlayStation 3 Hack Released Online

Posted by Soulskill on from the let-the-games-begin dept.

itwbennett writes "On Friday, George Hotz, best known for cracking Apple's iPhone, said he had managed to hack the PlayStation 3 after five weeks of work with 'very simple hardware cleverly applied, and some not so simple software.' Days later, he has now released the exploit, saying in a blog post that he wanted to see what others could do with it. 'Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released,' he wrote. 'I have a life to get back to and can't keep working on this all day and night.'" Reader MBCook points out an article written by Nate Lawson "explaining how the hack bypasses the hypervisor to gain unrestricted access to memory. It seems the trick is to use a pulse to glitch the hypervisor while it's unmapping memory, leaving a favorable page table entry."

6 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Summary of what I've seen so far by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Indeed, the 7th SPU is in isolated mode at this point, and cannot be accessed even by the hypervisor. But it may be possible to reflash the system and take over the isolated setup code.

  2. Re:Does this open the floodgates? by Sir_Lewk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If by "hackability", you mean Halo...

    I think the GP isn't suggesting that this will make the PS3 fair better to any significant degree in the market at large, but rather make it more popular with nerd types you might find on places like slashdot.

    Who knows though, it probably wouldn't be too out of line to claim that iphone unlocking made those more desirable, plenty of my non-nerd friends have unlocked iphones.

    --
    "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
  3. Re:Works on PS3 slim? by RoFLKOPTr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Will I be able to install Linux on it now? If so, I will buy one.

    Don't buy a PS3 simply for the sake of installing Linux on it. The PS3 only has 256MB of system RAM and Linux does not run well at all on it (I know this from personal experience with a PS3-specific Linux flavor). Just build a computer for $500.

  4. Linux runs a bit better these days... by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Don't buy a PS3 simply for the sake of installing Linux on it.

    I would certainly agree with that. As you say, there are much better deals, price/performance-wise.

    The PS3 only has 256MB of system RAM and Linux does not run well at all on it...

    ...but this is a little overstated. Clever people figured out how to use the video ram as ultra-fast swap, which brings the effective RAM up to around 512MB. Still not awesome, but it makes Linux quite a bit more usable on the PS3.

    --
    PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
  5. Re:Summary of what I've seen so far by Narishma · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Except people could already access the GPU from Linux before (See http://wiki.ps2dev.org/ps3:rsx). It's not useful because nobody bothered to write a driver for it as far as I know. This new "hack" won't change anything about the situation.

    --
    Mada mada dane.
  6. Re:Works on PS3 slim? by pnewhook · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yes, yes, and I use mine as a bluray/DVD player, media console and webbrowser.

    Regardless it is NOT a PC, and I fail to see any benefit of installing Linux on it other than saying 'hey look what I can do!' Interesting academic exercise, but practically pointless.

    --
    Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.