PlayStation 4 Will Be Running Modified FreeBSD

jones_supa writes "This discovery comes nicely alongside the celebration of FreeBSD's 20th birthday, for all the UNIX nerds. The operating system powering the PlayStation 4 is Orbis OS, which is a Sony spin of FreeBSD 9.0. It's not a huge surprise FreeBSD is being used over Linux, in part due to the more liberal licensing. The PlayStation 4 is x86-64 based now rather than Cell-based, which makes it easier to use FreeBSD. BSDs in general currently lack manufacturer supported full-feature AMD graphics driver, which leads to the conclusion that Sony and AMD have likely co-developed a discrete driver for the PS4. Some pictures of the development kit boot loader (GRUB) have been published too."

Comments

A great win for FreeBSD

[cold fjord]

Its good to see a BSD release picking up another major instance of commercial use. One of the obstacles the BSDs have faced is mindshare. Linux has had such an overpowering presence in the free/open world that it often overshadows the BSDs. That plays out in the commercial software that is available. If you look at high end vendor software, such as Oracle or other databases, or CAD tools, it is pretty rare to see much released for anything except Red Hat, or maybe Suse Linux. But getting the BSDs out where users are aware of it will definitely help.

This will also probably also be good for FreeBSD in terms of its codebase as well. I expect Sony will probably be feeding back some patches.

Re:A great win for FreeBSD

[imp]

Apple has contributed lots of patches back to BSD. Juniper has contributed much to BSD, etc.

In general, people that use BSD contribute patches back because it is in their best financial interest to do so. Not because the license says they must, but because they want to. This generally leads to better quality patches too, in my experience.

But don't expect the video driver: that's likely covered by NDA with AMD...

Jobs Told IBM and Sony Where to Stick Cell

[l0ungeb0y]

The PlayStation 4 is x86-64 based now rather than Cell-based, which makes it easier to use FreeBSD

Funny how Sony tried to woo Apple over to the Cell architecture, even offering Apple Sony authored PS3 games for the Mac.

As it happens, Intel's was not the only alternative chip design that Apple had explored for the Mac. An executive close to Sony said that last year Mr. Jobs met in California with both Nobuyuki Idei, then the chairman and chief executive of the Japanese consumer electronics firm, and with Kenichi Kutaragi, the creator of the Sony PlayStation.

Mr. Kutaragi tried to interest Mr. Jobs in adopting the Cell chip, which is being developed by I.B.M. for use in the coming PlayStation 3, in exchange for access to certain Sony technologies. Mr. Jobs rejected the idea, telling Mr. Kutaragi that he was disappointed with the Cell design, which he believes will be even less effective than the PowerPC.

source: What's Really Behind the Apple-Intel Alliance / NYTimes / 2005

Other sources I am too lazy to dig up cited Jobs as stating that his main mover for this decision was that he in no way wanted any Apple product associated with a gaming console. Call it Platformism, but if that citation is correct, it was very solid reasoning from Jobs. Every PC pundit on the planet would have had a field day with that one. Never mind that the US DoD (and likely the NSA) has found the Cell architecture in PS3s most useful for clustering, since the Cell architecture is so very cheap and so very good at that. citation

Re:Jobs Told IBM and Sony Where to Stick Cell

[kc8apf]

Having been part of the team that evaluated practically every processor being considered for Apple products from 2003-2009, Cell wasn't used because it sucks as a general purpose processor. The SPUs are interesting but you need to completely rewrite algorithms to use them effectively. While porting to Intel wasn't exactly easy (mostly due to the endian switch), it didn't involve rewriting every compute-heavy algorithm from scratch. Intel also had a roadmap while Cell was a point design.

The PlayStation 3 supposedly used FreeBSD too

[Gadget_Guy]

I was under the impression that the PlayStation 3's OS was already based on FreeBSD, which means that this is not entirely unexpected news. According to the PS3 System Software page on Wikipedia:

The native operating system of the PlayStation 3 is CellOS, which is believed to be a branch from the FreeBSD project. The 3D computer graphics API software used in the PlayStation 3 is LibGCM and PSGL, based on OpenGL ES and Nvidia's Cg. The PlayStation 3 uses the XrossMediaBar (XMB) as its graphical user interface.

Re:License war commencing...

[rmdashrf]

Personally, from my point of view, it's more like:

GPL: had BSD been licenced under GPL, then I would not just have worked as free labour for Sony, but Sony actually had to give something in return for using my code (not money, but improvements).

BDS: I don't mind being free labour for multinationals and them making large amounts of money off of my work, as long as I am being credited in the code (which is not open sourced so nobody will actually see who wrote what).

I prefer GPL myself and I know that it's actually a more selfish choice, I do actually somewhat admire people who do seem to be completely selfless and use the BSD licence, the world would be a better place if everyone was like that. However, not everyone is like that and I am sure that if both BSD and Linux were both using the GPL licence, Sony would still not have gone through the trouble of developing their very own. That's called leveraging existing technology, where the main goal is saving money by not having to re-invent the wheel.

Sony now had the choice of:

- Some Free software, where they actually have to put effort in to provide their improvements back to the community

or

- Some free software, which they can use in which ever way they want without having to do anything in return.

Easy choice.