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

Firmware 3.21

[project-nova]

From TFA:

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

!News

They had me at "Free"

[Fibe-Piper]

...wait, I have to buy a PS3?

Re:They had me at "Free"

[the_humeister]

You don't have to, but if you get caught taking one without paying for it, you might go to jail.

Also, since the source code is open for all to see, you can just read the code and allocate all resources using pen and paper. It's much better than D&D, trust me.

Running in OtherOS, not natively

[ard]

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.

Re:Firmware 3.21

[smash]

For now. Given the root key is compromised expect more varied hardware/firmware support in due course.

*NOT* related to the recent crypto break

[fgrieu]

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

Re:Firmware 3.21

[present_arms]

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.

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..

[wvmarle]

Seriously: what do you want to do with such a cluster, and why is a PS3 more interesting than general PC hardware?

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.

Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those..

[Quince alPillan]

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/

who needs scooby-doo?

[alen]

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

Re:who needs scooby-doo?

[present_arms]

your username is var?

Re:who needs scooby-doo?

[Crudely_Indecent]

Maybe that's his child's username...or worse, it's his childs name!

Cool - no hardware hack required

[Algorithmnast]

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.

Re:Cool - no hardware hack required

[ElberethZone]

Well you also need a PS3 which stills have OtherOS functionality (fat model AND firmware 3.21 maximum).
If you do have a fat PS3 with later firmwares (current is 3.55) then you will need to downgrade with usb dongle (or equivalent like psfServiceMod for some HTC phones).
You can also wait for the promised AsBestOS hack that should bring back OtherOS style support to the current firmwares.

So it was a cool hack until Sony decided to remove OtherOS support to avoid hacks (and this did not worked as expected for them...).

Re:Firmware 3.21

[CODiNE]

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.

Re:Firmware 3.21

[ciderbrew]

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.

Re:What's the point?

[eyegor]

Power/Cooling and physical footprint are also considerations one needs to worry about. Price/CPU is very good on a PS3 too. For certain types of tasks, the CEL processor is ideal. We don't need a lot of RAM or hard drive either. We just need to crunch through a lot of numbers quickly.

Re:Crucify me...

[arivanov]

For the same reason anyone would like to use BSD on a platform instead of linux.

There are multiple possible reasons:

1. Licensing.
2. BSD has a number of interesting concepts like netgraph which allow for efficient (and controlled) movement of data from kernel to userspace applications and back. While you can do some of that in Linux, it is considerably easier to do that in BSD. So if you have a couple of BSD geeks to code it, your time to market for a high performance scalable system may be considerably less than in Linux.
3. The code in a lot of systems is considerably more clean and understandable than in Linux. If you have to modify the core OS it may be considerably easier to do so in a maintainable manner. This is doubly so today as we live in the days when Linus changes ABIs at the speed one changes nappies on a toddler with diarrhea. I would never even consider maintaining a linux kernel patch in the long term. With BSD - different story, any day, any time.

Re:Firmware 3.21

[rikkards]

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

Re:This is why FreeBSD is not 'enterprise'

[Bruce Cran]

It was fixed via a FreeBSD Foundation project in 8.0 and merged back to 7.x.

Re:I only have one word to say about this

[hairyfeet]

Well to be fair the Linux guy would want to "spice up" your drink with all these 'free" ingredients that were made for a dozen different drinks that didn't go together, so what you ended up with smelled suspiciously like RMS's feet and tasted just as bad. The Windows guy would just pour you some stale shit from a can while swearing it is completely fresh and flavorful, while the Apple guy would offer you an "iSmoothy" that cost three times what it was worth and when you told him you didn't like Pineapple he would say "Liar! Everyone LOVES Pineapple! You just aren't cultured enough to appreciate the experience!"

So I guess the moral of the story is to pour your own drinks and OS guys typically have bad taste in booze.

Re:Firmware 3.21

[hairyfeet]

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.