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FreeBSD Running On PS3

Posted by kdawson on from the what-took-so-long dept.

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.

5 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Firmware 3.21 by project-nova · · Score: 4, Informative

    From TFA:

    Supported hardware:
    - Sony Playstation 3 Fat, firmware version 3.21
    - Netbooting only
    - 480i/480p only

    !News

  2. Running in OtherOS, not natively by ard · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. *NOT* related to the recent crypto break by fgrieu · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  4. Cool - no hardware hack required by Algorithmnast · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.. by Quince+alPillan · · Score: 3, Informative
    The Navy says that they're cheaper than equivalent boards from IBM.

    Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.

    http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/09/military-purchases-2200-ps3s/