Valve's Big Picture Could Be a Linux Game Console

Penurious Penguin writes that "a hopeful article at The Verge persuasively suggests that through Valve, Linux could soon become a formidable contender in the gaming arena, capable of holding its own against such giants as Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the Wii. With 50 million users, a growing Linux team, a caboodle of interesting experiments ('Steam Box' hardware baselines, etc.) and a strong conviction that more-open platforms are the way, Valve may actually see it through."

Comments

Hmmm

[systemidx]

"The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii are nearing their end. As powerful as they have been in the living room, gamers want more."

Quoted from TFA. Am I the only one who wants LESS? I don't really want my game system to do 9 million things. I just want it to play games.

Then again, when was the last time we were actually listened to? Draconian DRM, the removal of OtherOS, etc...

Re:Hmmm

[davydagger]

"I want it to do more, but I don't want it to be running Linux, or Android, or any other mainstream OS"

you won't notice the linux, any more than you notice the windows in the xbox, except it recycles already compiled game code meant for linux.

linux is just a kernel. boot straight to whatever minimal controller based GUI you have, with a few auto-run runs for disk insertion, to run whatever game you insert.

That would be pretty trivial to write/configure with a mainstream linux setup. XBMC does this pretty nicely as a media player. Its just a UI that can run instead of a desktop.

just have init call it from boot, with a nice splash screen and you'd never knew it ran linux.

that said, you need a powerful multicore capable OS to run most major games today. It'd make the game desigeners lives easy if they were common libraries and a common OS underneath.

Re:Hmmm

[Mal-2]

There's no technical reason it can't handle 32 GB of flash -- it just couldn't do that at the $99 price point. Swapping flash is pretty trivial as user upgrades go, so I don't really see that holding it back. The capacity limit of SDHC being reached might pose an issue, if it's not made to accept SDXC. The hardware is the same, and the firmware can probably be hacked -- just like Rockbox did for the Sansa (mine is quite happy with a 16 GB micro-SDHC card when it was built to handle just a 2 GB micro-SD card), so I doubt THAT will be a significant issue either.

Naturally the Ouya will look to replace some settop-box functions, since even new TVs have a finite number of inputs. That doesn't mean it will be particularly optimized for them, or that it needs to be.

Re:Hmmm

[rtb61]

Android being the magic word missing in the article and what it likely is really all about. Building custom Linux distributions like Android and achieving an open market, where more downstream producers and manufacturers can gain greater control. People might complain about those phones and various other Android devices, that manufacturers release with their own branding layer and marketing identity on top but that really is a major advantage of Linux. Even software distribution companies can get in on the act and create an environment where they are not having to pay extortion to another party in order to do business.

It is all about shaking out those billions from M$ and releasing it to a whole bunch of companies, manufacturers, software producers and net entities in order to improve their bottom line and give them greater control. So for Valve, it's not so much a game console but being able to distribute games across a 'ALL' available platforms, phone, tablet, smartbook, PC and Big Screen Display. For the end user buy one game and use it across all your platforms via Steam or the other game distributors will become very desirable and avoiding a pointless 30% M$ extortion fee for nothing, even after having to pay for their bloody software, will mean more money for actual hardware and software creators.

Re:Hmmm

[Dunbal]

I have a quite-definite-omnibox. It's called a desktop PC. And we have come full circle, except I never left. Nor did I pay for all the steps on that circle.

Re:Hmmm

[Hognoxious]

I could see the kernel being used, but the OS would probably consist of new libraries for sound, input, storage, networking etc.

I'd give a long rebuttal of your points but I don't have time: I'm working on an awesome replacement for those round things under my car.

Re:Hmmm

[Jeeeb]

I want it to do more, but I don't want it to be running Linux, or Android, or any other mainstream OS. Sure it means that I may get more apps, as developers are more familiar with it, but these general purpose operating systems just seem to slow things down in the end. My console just needs to play games, allow me to watch videos, and surge the web

So in other words the kernel only needs to provide:

• Disk drivers and file-system drivers
• Wireless/Ethernet drivers and a complete network stack
• USB and input device drivers
• Video card drivers and OpenGL-ES
• Sound card drivers
• Support for preemptive multitasking over multi-cores for games that want/need to utilize multiple cores (i.e. most modern games)
• Virtual memory to support copy on write, memory mapped files and to provide protection from buggy games crashing the entire system and potential corrupting disk data
• Power management
• Miscellaneous functions such as executable loading, .etc.

Might as well use Linux by this stage. It would sure beat re-inventing the wheel. Plus it gives you a much greater chance of developers actually supporting your platform. The fact that your Android device slows down when receiving messages while gaming sounds like a problem with the design of Android.

Re:Hmmm

[tibit]

You demonstrably have no clue about OS design, or even design of embedded software. The despicable multitasking you claim is so bad, if absent from the OS, will be badly reimplemented by everyone and their mother because the world we live in is full of asynchronous events. Any kernel worth its salt will multitask, even if all the tasks are lightweight run-to-completion tasks. There's no way around it. Interrupt handlers do preemptive multitasking, if you haven't noticed it yet. Even Windows 2 did cooperative multitasking for userland code, and preemptive stuff in the "kernel".

Any sort of a communications or driver stack that's more than a minimalistic proof-of-concept will have to multitask. Multitask as in interrupt handlers doing the minimum necessary amount of work so as not to unduly impact the overall interrupt latency of the system. Then normally scheduled bottom half tasklets finish up the work. You need this for USB, for networking, for really anything you can think of. Without solid scheduling and task preemption, you're doomed. Implementing most communication protocols becomes rather easy once you have interrupts, tasklets and timers.

As for those "annoying things" you claim your Android phone does, they happen precisely because things are *not* properly coded for asynchronous execution. Things get slow, almost universally, when something somewhere blocks, or worse, busy-waits (spins). It's rather unfortunate that neither C nor C++ really facilitates writing well performing software that's able to react to asynchronous events. Writing state machines explicitly with each state being a function/method or even a select case is a pain. You'd think it'd be a well solved problem by now, but it's not, and developers being what they are, you see plenty of applications that present you with busy cursors with no CPU nor I/O load to back it up. That's blocking behavior, and it's there because it's somewhat hard to write code otherwise. Every example code out there for receiving data from any device (serial port, network, etc). is fundamentally wrong and contributes to the problem:

      send("foo");
      read(buf);
      if (buf == "bar") { ... };

For your console to do your "one thing at a time" well, it must do a hundred things in parallel behind the scenes. It's your lack of appreciation of this simple fact that makes your post an uninformed rant.

Re:Good news for Linux

[DeathFromSomewhere]

You can thank Microsoft for that. Why would someone buy from a third party when you can buy games from the store built into the operating system? Valve is running scared because they see their biggest revenue stream drying up.

Re:"Troll"? EXCUSE ME?

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam is what caused me and as far as I can tell all of my friends to start buying games instead of pirating them.
Steam offer something piracy does not, hassle free installing. It also offers something buying games in stores does not, the ability to get the game right now and great deals.

Spotify did the same regarding music.

Will there be piracy, probably. Will it be rampant on the steambox? Probably not, just use your normal computer.

Re:Piracy

[symbolset]

Look, Microsoft is pushing all software through their own store if they can beginning with Windows 8. Steam is a software store that would compete with that store, on Microsoft's Windows platform. Gabe Newell used to work at Microsoft. He knows this means they intend to eliminate the Steam software sales store in Windows, and they are as eminently able to do that as they have been to sabotage all other software that competes with their offerings on Windows. The Goose has fled and Valve needs a new goose. Hence the console plan. An own-brand console gives Valve a platform that cannot be made to sabotage their content.

A lot of casuals are just going tablet and phone, really.

It could be worse. Retail box software vendors are just out of luck. No more sales for you.