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.

Comments

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those..

[eyegor]

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.

Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those..

[eyegor]

We do a lot of High Performance computing where I work. I currently run a 1472 core ROCKS cluster and the price/core of a PS3 cluster is pretty good compared with an HP blade.

Because of management issues, I can't see running a huge cluster of PS3's, but it's an angle we're pursuing to see how well it works. Tesla-based clusters are also something being considered, but they type of work you can do on them is a bit more limited than a general purpose cluster based on conventional blades.