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FreeBSD Running On PS3
An anonymous reader writes "One week after Sony's PlayStation 3 private cryptography key was obtained, FreeBSD is up and running on the PS3. Nathan Whitehorn writes: 'Yesterday, I imported support for the Sony Playstation 3 into our 64-bit PowerPC port, expanding our game console support into the current generation. There are still a few rough edges due to missing hardware support, but the machine boots and runs FreeBSD stably. These rough edges should be smoothed out in time for the 9.0 release.'" Update: 01/10 15:04 GMT by KD : As several commenters have pointed out, the submission was misleading in that BSD runs in OtherOS, making no use of the cracked keys.
SWEET
http://chimpbox.us
From TFA:
Supported hardware:
- Sony Playstation 3 Fat, firmware version 3.21
- Netbooting only
- 480i/480p only
!News
...wait, I have to buy a PS3?
I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank.
What does this have to do with the root-key? Nothing as far as I can see. It requires a FAT PS3 with OtherOS support.
I'm not sure this has anything to do with the released key. It's netbooting... There's not really enough info in the post to suggest that it does (or does not) have anything to do with the recent hack.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
There is no relation to the cracked keys, as it runs in the OtherOS mode. I.e. instead of Linux, you can run FreeBSD in OtherOS.
For now. Given the root key is compromised expect more varied hardware/firmware support in due course.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
This is *NOT* related to the recent crypto break, as demonstrated by the release note stating
Supported hardware:Sony Playstation 3 Fat, firmware version 3.21
Francois Grieu
hey it's a start, he did say that some hardware is yet to be done, and what can I say, from little acorns, this is news, means we get our PS3's back for what we (OK, OK I) originally wanted one for. Today BSD, soon, Linux then who knows, this is excellent news for us robbed by Sony.
http://chimpbox.us
Yeah.
Now when there's a dual-boot with full hardware support so that, say, I can load it with XBMC and use it as a media center frontend... THAT will be something.
The idea of retiring my current XBMC PC is intriguing to me. One less thing hooked to the TV.
Yes, I know I could do similar with a number of upnp media servers - but those are lousy with fast-forwarding and 30-second jump, only work with certain encoding types (in particularly they barf on FLV's), and anything where I need to turn on subtitles/captioning or want to switch to an alternate audio stream, forget it.
The hack impresses me, very very cool. Though I thought it's NetBSD that's the one that always tries to run on everything from your digital watch to your toaster.
Anyway, the real question: is there any use to this? It's not like FreeBSD is known for having many games to play with.
Our company was setting up a small cluster of PS3's but the whole project died when Sony locked down the firmware. This should breath new life into the effort.
I was secretly hoping they'd give the "useless" PS3's to the employees though. Sigh.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
this is so fuckin' cool. next time my 3 year old wants to watch a scooby DVD, Cars or play the Rub a Dub Rub demo i'll just boot up the PS3 to the command line and excite him with /home/var
I was worried at first that I'd have to burn a chip or something equally prone to destroying an expensive toy... but after I actually researched it... here, I find that you don't have to mod the PS3 at all - you just have to create a disk that looks like a game disk to the PS3.
And if you want to go back to PS3 behavior, you just reset the PS3 box.
Now that is a cool hack.
No it's not. At least until there's a port-able, AsbestOS dual-boot loader.
This only works if you never updated your PS3 past 3.21 firmware and you have to set up another box on your network to netboot it.
but I still don't get why anyone wants to run FreeBSD on a PS3?
I'm Not Antisocial, I'm Just Not User Friendly
Netbooting?
While TFA may state that the guest OS must be net-booted, TFA says to use Petitboot as the bootloader.
But Petitboot's installations directions don't mention require loading an image from the network, but do state that Petitboot can only load images that are directly connected to the PS3.
The Petitboot page also mentions other things about the PS3, so it's not as if you have to boot-strap from petiteboot into TFA's OS...
IOW - it seems that TFA is stressing "you have to" when it should merely claim "here's how to use netbooting". There's a world of difference there.
...were used to actually play games?
Neither do I.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Perhaps no large distribution is willing to touch those keys and risk a court battle with Sony over it. It's all well and good for people to sign their own firmwares and install them, but a larger release brings risks.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
That's just a matter of what the developer(s) had handy at the time. If you have a homebrew-capable PS3 (3.41 or older) you don't upgrade it for now, so a lot of homebrew initially shows up for some specific firmware version and then gets ported to others. Soon enough we'll have proper homebrew-capable custom 3.55 firmwares thanks to the key release, so give it time.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
I wonder what sony would say. Is the use of a key illegal? Its not illegal to find it on webpage and use it is it?
Maybe someone could write a rootkit with it. I'm sure sony wouldn't mind that.
The important part of what he said was:
Sony Playstation 3 Fat, firmware version 3.21
ie, you can only get this through the "Other OS" function, which has been able to run Linux all along. The summary was updated to include this fact.
which is totally what she said
From my experience, retiring XBMC would do you more good than such a hack ;).
Ye gods, did I hate XBMC.
On topic: As many others have noted, this has nothing to do with the released keys. I for one admit that I don't care to run any other OS on my PS3 than the original. What I would appreciate, though, is being able to download 'pirated' software.
Me pirating, and then buying stuff I liked is a tried and true way to make not only the vendors of said stuff happy, but myself as well. And quite frankly, my happiness > happiness of vendors selling crappy software.
The current port of XBMC (Linux/Windows) is actually very pleasant. My current living room frontend is a winxp box (slightly old tv tuner that has absolutely shit Linux support, sadly) and I use XBMC quite happily with it.
If I could get the PS3 running XBMC, I'd likely move the PC out of the room. The PC does take a bit of space, and is a little loud, especially having to run it 24/7 to keep schedule for recording. But like I said, I need to record CC streams along with TV (there are times when other ambient noise, and the presence of friends with hearing issues, makes subtitling/closed captioning a godsend) and being able to switch it on and off would be great.
UPnP servers also don't let you define the language and subtitle track on the fly, which is a pain when you're a foreign film geek and have been slowly ripping your library of DVD's to your network so as not to wear down on the discs.
Can't you get a quad core x86 box with far more RAM/disk for about the same money?
I'm pretty sure one would run rings around the PS3 for most computing tasks.
No sig today...
Presumably if a hack restores the function (which I believe was simply disabled, not removed) then it might work on later firmwares also.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1 ps3 are about $299 a piece
2 They have the processing power of 7 android G1 phones
3 NewEgg can get you a Xenon, 1TB hard drive, and 16GB of ram for under $1000
4. It can with one core outperform the underpowered cell processors 10 to 1
Again big names don't equate to big returns.
Call me when they finally get it working on the new PS3s you can buy in stores. Those are generally referred to as "Slim" and have never had OtherOS support.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Hopefully. I heard that Linux was getting pretty usable on PS3 compared to when I first tried it, so it would be worth my while trying it again.
Turns out that 3.21 was in fact the first version which had Other OS removed, so I'm not entirely sure what's going on here. I CBA RTFA though. If they ever come out with it for the latest firmware then I'll have a look, but in the meantime I like being on PSN too much. And my netbook and phone already run Linux..
which is totally what she said
For me I would buy a PS3 in a heartbeat if XBMC was running on it. My old Xbox based XBMC is nice but I need a blu-ray player
with a BSD running on it, someone would find a way to get the Mach kernel working and get OS X up and running (granted it would need to be an older version with PPC support)
News flash, now the PS3 is dying!
Yes, you could run BSD in the OtherOS feature but the benefit to this method is that there is access to the direct hardware such as the GPU which wasn't available before. This is booting a true OS now instead of a OS inside the PlayStation OS.
Bryan
Unsurprisingly the fanbois have modden your down but I agree. I gave up on FreeBSD when I got fed up with reporting the bug that would crash the whole OS if someone accidently unplugged a mounted filesystem which was being used - eg floppy disk, USB stick. If they can't get basic stuff like that right what chance is there for the more complicated subsystems? I'll stick with Linux.
Unsurprisingly the fanbois have modden your down but I agree. I gave up on FreeBSD when I got fed up with reporting the bug that would crash the whole OS if someone accidently unplugged a mounted filesystem which was being used - eg floppy disk, USB stick. If they can't get basic stuff like that right what chance is there for the more complicated subsystems? I'll stick with Linux.
What version of FreeBSD are you running? I am a Free/OpenBSD Fanboy. I am running OpenBSD 4.8 FreeBSD 8.1. On my FreeBSD box, I cannot make my system crash in the way you suggest.
This was years ago , the last version I used was 6.0. Thats the point at which I gave up. Perhaps they have fixed it now but I simply can't be bothered to check anymore.
I'd imagine there will be a very large quantity of new PS3 OSs and OS distributions! but its good to see freeBSD ported! My biggest congratulations are for the next PS3 cluster super-computer! Just out of idle curisoty though: I remember Sony reading they are making a loss on PS3 hardware - offset by the sale of games. so id love to know if they can calculate a their losses from puchases of PS3's for other purposes (or if they can estimate their losses any more accuratly than losses to pirated games) Also, The cell archietcture is pretty advanced - what do slashdotters reckon will be running the PS4 that would make it a worthwhile upgrade?
It was fixed via a FreeBSD Foundation project in 8.0 and merged back to 7.x.
GhettoBSD is to be ported to PS3. A new era of free/cheap games on high-end hardware is here!
Update: Porting failed.
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
DMCA
Yahoo! and a lot of web facing sites want a word with you :D
http://chimpbox.us
Have you tried Mediaportal? It is free, has a ton of plug ins and skins to make it into anything you want, has a nice UI, really stable, for HTPCs I'd say Mediaportal is better than XBMC as far as experience IMHO.
As for TFA, it doesn't really matter whether they use the keys or not, the secret is out. From watching the videos from the hacker conference once they got the keys it was game over thanks to flaws in the core design of the PS3. As we have seen the "smart cow" analogy is all too true, once one figures out the trick it quickly will be picked up by others who will run with it.
Personally I don't get why the console makers trip over themselves trying to block other usage. I thought the PS3 original idea was the smart one, give them a way to play with the hardware but not get to the parts required to run games. Hell I'd have gone one further and allowed access to ALL the hardware via a sandbox except the crypto required to run games, so that anybody could add any media center style front end they wanted. It would have kept the hackers happy by giving them most of the hardware to play with AND could have sold more units by giving people media options, it may have even caused a cottage industry to pop up with VARs selling different front end enabled consoles to the masses.
I guess the industry will never learn. They continue to shoot themselves in the foot, all for the sake of DRM that just screws the customers while painting a "fuck with me!" sign on it for the hackers. Stupid is as stupid does I suppose.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Don't worry: there are other, similarly destructive bugs out there. My current favorite is the Intel Ethernet driver bug which causes the machine to hang, sometimes unable to POST directly after a reboot. Second on the list is the new USB stack, which has some severe issues making USB storage all but unusable as a boot medium (since 8.0 and 7.3), and imposes other mass storage unreliabilities. And of course, there's ports itself...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Yet that means nothing. Enterprises use some really ass-backwards shit. When you've got the staff to maintain your own branches independently, track down obscure bugs, and avoid/circumvent/fix the worst of them, that's one thing.
If "enterprise grade storage" had half the problems that FreeBSD has, we'd all be attacking each other with pointy sticks right now due to data loss catapulting us back to the dark ages.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
We also don't use GCC. We typically use the Intel or PGI compilers and applications like IDL or Matlab.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
The DMCA doesn't always apply. Chamberlain v. Skylink; Lexmark v. Static Control Components.
Turns out that 3.21 was in fact the first version which had Other OS removed, so I'm not entirely sure what's going on here.
It could be that a < got stripped.
Looked at Mediaportal a while back. It lacked the built-in routines to handle overscan correction (my TV has a VGA input that only handles "surrounded by 1 inch of black" or "zoomed in way too far" modes).
The overscan correction of XBMC, now that it's become stable, makes it my playback option of choice for the HTPC for now.
They sell this console at a loss, and expect to make a profit on people buying games..every sale to a geek who just wanted some cheap access to a relatively exotic piece of kit-cell processor you know, not real common-means more or less giving it away for less than the cost of manufacture.
Ain't nothing in it for them to sell one unlocked today unless you might be willing to pay double (what the fuck ever, an increase, substantial) normal retail for it. Still interested? And even then they would have the marketing headache of trying to justify an identical unit with two different prices, people who wanted it unlocked would be bitching nonstop about the price difference, taking them to court, etc..
I don't like sony much either, but I think this explains their reasoning, it *does* make some sense looking at it from their POV.
From my experience, retiring XBMC would do you more good than such a hack ;).
Ye gods, did I hate XBMC.
You are literally the only person I've ever seen say anything close to that. Unless your only experience has been with the early PC builds where hardware video decoding and the like weren't yet working I really don't see any reason to hate, or even dislike, XBMC.
It provides a great 10 foot UI for accessing your media on a TV, plays everything known to man, and runs on all three major OSes plus two "appliance" type devices (three if you count the XBMC-derived Boxee Box). Sigma Designs is even porting it to their SoCs.
Show me another home media platform with nearly the flexibility and ease of use. The closest competition is Boxee, which sacrifices local media features for internet media capabilities.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
How can an OS level bug cause firmware/BIOS level problems? And or tell me what hardware I can reproduce this bug on.
Fat?
How about PS3 Slim? Isn't that what we all want, anyway?
Kriston
The USB issue (7.3, 8.0, 8.1, probably CURRENT, etc.) can be reproduced on the following hardware with a variety of USB flash and rotational media:
* Supermicro boards (Intel controllers)
* Old hardware with Intel boards (eg. Celeron P4s)
* AMD Athlon 64 boards with Nvidia controllers
* AMD Phenom II boards with ATI controllers
* Possibly a couple others
The Intel Ethernet issue is present in FreeBSD, not the hardware - as evidenced by other hardware not having the issue, and other systems playing fine with the same hardware (for very extended periods of time), including earlier FreeBSD releases.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Consider the performance of FreeBSD to Linux on other machines and architectures. Now, such a device could be used as a console/thin client when connected to another machine running FreeBSD. One can set up a router, using the PS3 to SSH into other local machines.
Too many people are eager to blame Sony over this - while forgetting that it was the initial potential threat of hacking (the first one by Geohot which depended upon OtherOD) that galvanised them into removing that functionality from the older models. I can't really find a reason to blame Sony for THAT.