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PlayStation 4 Will Be Running Modified FreeBSD

Posted by samzenpus on from the under-the-hood dept.

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."

2 of 457 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Jobs Told IBM and Sony Where to Stick Cell by kc8apf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    kc8apf
  2. Re:A great win for FreeBSD by imp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...