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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."
BSD license, I'm not sure you understand it.
So how trivial will it be to slurp the OS out onto a AMD card enabled PC and have our own "HackStation4"?
Or... how would one modify FreeBSD to run PS4 software?
I'm sure there'll be encryption up the wazoo anyway... and potentially software could specifically check that the graphics chip is not some off-the-shelf AMD card... ...but it begs the question.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
PS4 is on FreeBSD, X1 is on a Windows-kernel abomination, and the Steam box is going to be Linux. Interesting. Any chance the WiiU has secret Mac lineage to complete this?
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.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The license war he's talking about would proceed approximately as follows:
GPL: had BSD been licensed under the GPL (I know, word salad), then Sony would have been forced to release the modifications to the kernel, and we would be able to better mod the PS4/overall cost to society would be lower since all the improvements would be available to everyone
BSD: had BSD been licensed under the GPL, Sony would not have used the kernel, they would never upstream any changes, and the overall cost to society would be greater since they would have been forced to develop their own, in-house kernel.
I'm trying to be neutral here, but I'm probably just starting the flamewar. You probably can tell what my bias is, but whatever.
This has been disputed over and over again. I think that after 42 years of trolling, we now all agree on which one is the best and why, no ?
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
After the IBM vs SCO fiasco, maybe Xenix can be put to good use.
You're a bit out of date. The video drivers were pretty crappy when AMD inherited them from ATi, but they've gotten steadily better since then. Neither AMD nor NVIDIA has perfect drivers, but they are now roughly on par with each other.
The exception is CrossFire, which is still inferior in several ways to SLI. But both CrossFire and SLI are dumb hacks (and aren't being used on any consoles), so it doesn't really matter.
Imagine being able to start up your PS4 to GRUB? Even just giving us the graphics driver this time around Sony would be nice, since you're playing the good guy this gen.
Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
Sony might not, but if AMD has done more driver development for *nix as a result of the PS4 design, then that will probably help improve the Linux and FreeBSD drivers as well.
I'm not biting. ;D
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Sony used NetBSD for PSP according to slashdot. True Sony might have ported some Linux tools over to BSD, but BSD is something they are familiar with. I doubt the OS was linux based but I know you could run it on the PS2 from what I remember reading.
Apple also uses FreeBSD for the same licensing reasons not to mention it does not radically change and is designed rather than grown.
http://saveie6.com/
Whether or not Sony gives back patches really won't have any significant impact on their sales. The vast majorty of people who would buy a PS4 will never hear about it, and would not care if they would.
I expect that they will not upstream the things people would probably care about most (graphics drivers), becuase they will be propritary and co-developed with vendors. However my guess is that they will contribute a steady stream of small incremental improvements that no one will ever hear about. These are the normal by-product of smart people working on a system.
The reason they will contribte these bits back is pure self-interest: the next time they upgrade they hopefully don't have to re-apply the patch they created. They are not giving the crown jewels away, the things that make Sony its money, but rather the things that Sony as a business does not care about. This is how FreeBSD works. It is not as "pure" as the ideas behind the GPL, but it does work a lot better for the corprorate/capitalistic point of view. And that is how we structure our society, for better or worse.
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.
Emacs the answer is.
Indeed. The best is whatever works for you.
BSD: Good if you want high availability/adoption and don't care if derived projects are OSS.
Linux: Good if you want high availability but no closed-source spinoffs.
Also, OS X is based on NextStep which was BSD at its core from way before Linux even existed.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
There aren't even many Linux Zealots left.
No need to gloat when you've conquered the world.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
True which made porting the FreeBSD userland apps much easier than an NT or Linux based kernel. While the kernel is still Mach based it is close enough that code can be cut and pasted in from FreeBSD with small efforts to compile itl.
http://saveie6.com/
It is funny how there are many definitions of Sony . When they opened the bootloader for Android the Slashdot crowd reasoning was "it was the Ericsson part" (even if the Ericsson was dropped) that is the reason they play nicely. But the Sony - BMG rootkit scandal was Sony doing, even if you can seed the same doubt. I think when they opened up their smartwatch (http://developer.sonymobile.com/services/open-smartwatch-project/smartwatch-hacker-guide/) is also Ericsson doing I presume ? Companies can change you know especially if they did some wrong in the past, the world isn't always black & white.
That being said, I don't know if you are aware that a lot of the older people (that made the PS3 decisions) with regarding the SCEE are out of the picture. The PS4 wasn't even developed in Japan or by a Japanese, hell it will even be released earlier in the US and Europe. If you follow the news a bit you will see Sony has a massive attitude change regarding the PS4. You just need to look how they are handling Indie's these days. You must read the humbling interviews with a guy like Cerny, what a chance in comparison with the arrogant Sony.
With regarding the OS a lot of people seem to forgot that Sony also supported linux through the PS2 lifetime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2) and they never took it back. So it may be that the removal of the OtherOS for piracy reasons was more valid then the so called hatred for Linux suddenly. There are strong opinions about linux, but does opinions never involve the fact of the possibility of that method being abused as an easy way to pirate. Or what should be the real reason that they removed OtherOS support anyway ? Because they hate linus or RMS ?
You are right there should be other mod options like "living in the past" that I would gladly reward you with.
GPL: Good if you want high availability but no closed-source spinoffs.
FTFY!
We're talking about licenses, not kernels.
Their drivers aren't crap, but they aren't up to nVidia's standards. I've a 7970M in my laptop, which I got when it was a brand new chip, and it has been a trial. So there are two big issues it has had, only which could be relevant to the PS4:
1) Issues with Enduro, that's AMD's hybrid GPU switching. The laptop can use the integrated Intel 4000 graphics for easy stuff and fire up the 7970M for hard stuff. Well until fairly recently, that didn't work that well. The 7970M didn't operate at full capacity, something with the drivers was inefficient. You could see it on other laptops which has a mux to allow you to switch off the iGPU. With just the 7970M they ran much faster. AMD finally got it (mostly) fixed, but it took for damn well ever. Also when it first came out, the interface for choosing GPUs was really clunky.
2) OpenGL issues. AMD has sucked at the OpenGL for as long as I can remember, and it never seems to get better. They SUPPORT it, but it doesn't work well. On nVidia, GL and DX run equally fast. They are both first-class APIs and there really is no speed or capability difference between them. On AMD, not so much. Recently the issues I've seen were with Brink and HFSS. Brink was a shit (man it was a waste of money) game that used iD Tech 4. As such, OpenGL. On my AMD GPU, it never ran well despite being WAY passed the spec needed. Tried it on a lesser spec nVidia system, flawless. Said problems were all over the forums. With HFSS we set up a desktop at work with a cheap AMD chip, a 7570 or something like that, just for basic graphics (it was server class hardware, so no good iGPU). The user reported HFSS worked over RDP, but not local and sure enough, that was the case. So it occurred to me: HFSS will use OpenGL to accelerate its interface. Out came the AMD card, in went a cheap nVidia GT 210, and HFSS worked fine.
Now of those, the OpenGL problem could be problematic to the PS4, since that's what it uses. Maybe they won't have a problem since this is ONLY a GL driver and they've had time and all that, but I worry. The PS4 may lose its, on paper, graphics advantage due to driver issues. It would suck for Sony if their console which has more graphics units and more memory bandwidth had lesser GPU capabilities because AMD can't work out a good GL driver.
At any rate the overall situation is AMD still has problems nVidia drivers don't. I really like AMD's hardware, it is often faster and is nearly always a good price, but I get continually bit with driver issues. Not something huge like "The system blue screens and won't run," but things that are very real and very annoying. Hence I have nVidia in my desktop and I've seriously considered replacing the card in my laptop (it is a Clevo laptop and the card is field replaceable). They aren't perfect, but I find them WAY less problematic.
And don't even get me started on Linux drivers. There is NO comparison there. nVidia binary drivers is lightyears ahead of anyone else.
Nothing wrong? From the previous /. article: "Starting last summer, however, AMD began having trouble with high-profile game releases that performed badly or had visual artifacts. Rage was one high-profile example, but there have been launch-day issues with a number of other titles, including Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, Bat Man: Arkham City, and Battlefield 3".
;)
Those are all recent popular titles. You need to look a bit harder
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
I heard on the internets that version 6 of Emacs was going to be called VI
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Sony grows up and decides not to hack up their own crappy OS any more, finally entering the 21st century. However in a nod back the PHB nest that traditionally comes up with their PHB strategies, they decide to go with the second best free kernel out there because it allows more scope for doing evil. Nice one Sony.
Oh well, it could be worse. The other guys have to use Windows.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
In construction: Your work is only as good as that of your worst sub[contractor].
My worst subcontractor is better than me you insensitive clod
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.
Nihil in publicum sputa.
Sony actually intended for it to be the graphic chips
No they didn't. Originally Toshiba were developing the RS, which was insanely fast for its time (128 scalar pipes at 1GHz; 16MB eDRAM). When their yields were too low, Sony went to nVidia and obtained RSX.
Early on they were doing graphics demos of things running on a number of Cell chips.
Indeed - I wrote one of them. We had no final GPU yet, because of the Toshiba fuck-up. There was a really slow temporary GPU solution. Some demos ran only on a frame buffer. The gas station demo rendered some basic polys but the fluid dynamics and rendering were on SPU. Mark Cerny did an experiment trying to run general-purpose GPU on the SPUs, but it failed because the SPUs were too slow to synthesize bilinearly interpolated texture lookups. If there had ever been an intent for the Cell to be the GPU, they would have had texture units (as Larrabee did).
However, it wasn't good at that either and as the PS3 went in to hardware development, it was clear that they'd need a real GPU.
That was always the plan.
Well rather than just admit that the Cell wasn't ready for a consumer device (I mean who the fuck tries to put first gen technology in a consumer device) they decided to make it the CPU instead, and had nVidia make them a GPU.
It was always going to be the CPU. Lots of people put first-gen technology into a consumer device (ever heard of BluRay, for instance?) They went to nVidia last minute because Toshiba fucked up.
Ultimately Cell's long term problem has been GPUs themselves. As you say Cell sucks as a general purpose CPU. No problem, that wasn't really its design. However as a stream processor it can't keep up with the new GPUs. That wasn't an issue when it was designed (this was back in the pre nVidia 8800 days) but now it gets out stream processed by GPUs.
The SPUs are far more flexible than stream processors. They have their own DMA engines and can run arbitrary control flow. They also run very fast even compared to a modern CPU. They were never designed to compete with GPUs. A single GPU stream processor is not very powerful, and morphing an algorithm onto a stream processor is a lot of hard work (even compared to SPU coding). The factor that made the design go to where it is now for PS4 is that GPUs became ridiculously wide and cheap. Cell is a niche product. GPUs are everywhere. GPUs just shit all over everything else for MFLOP/$.
You really need to stop posting things you made up that kind of make sense to Slashdot. Everything you've said is basically incorrect.
It is not as "pure" as the ideas behind the GPL, but it does work a lot better for the corprorate/capitalistic point of view.
Well, that explains why FreeBSD is so much more widely deployed than Linux in coporate/capitalistic situations.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Are there any Sony fanboys here? I only see negative comments about them.
I heard that Steve Jobs used to use VI. He switched to EMACS couldn't kick the habit of hitting the i key before typing.
Back in the day, all my servers ran NetBSD, but I have gradually migrated to Linux for hardware compatibility. AMD is going to have to write chipset and GRFX drivers for Sony. I hope the licensing terms will let them release them. I would love to run BSD on my AMD laptop. Considering AMD's past Linux support, this is probably just wishful thinking.
The PS4 wasn't even developed in Japan or by a Japanese, hell it will even be released earlier in the US and Europe.
While I agree with most of what you said I'm pretty sure this is false, at least for most part. During E3 they introduced the Japanese guy who designed the PS4 case. Also there is an interview with a Gearbox programmer(forgot his name) he says that they needed 8GB(instead of 4GB) or the PS4 would be dead. So they sent a guy to Japan headquarters in order to get a new devkit. Finally, the new controller was also designed by a Japanese team (there is an Engadget article about it with some AR demos). I don't think the PS4 was entirelly developed in Japan, but most of it's main features came from there. I have no idea about the exact date the PS4 will be released, but it makes sense releasing it first in the West because the holiday season. The Japanese release will follow in a few weeks max(as it's still supposed to come this year) so this fact is not really relevant.
To judge such cluster**** based on a handful of experiences(regardless of being bad or good) is just impossible.
No, it's easy, you make a decision based on how you personally feel about an issue and stick with it.
An assistant in a store was rude to me once, I decided not to shop there again. I've never been in the place since. She may, or may not, still be working there - I've made a decision and I'm sticking with it.
Same with Sony, I decided that one arm of the conglomerate commited an act heinous enough (to me), that I wouldn't buy Sony products - I voted with my feet.
In reality it's practically impossible to avoid Sony products since they have their corporate fingers in so many pies. But if I see a product has a Sony logo on it, I won't buy it.
Some of Sony's products are excellent, but I've decided that I won't give them my money. Some would say that I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face - but that really is the essence of voting with your feet this way.
I'll explain why I don't buy Sony if anybody's ever interested in listening, some understand my position some don't, or don't consider that it's an important enough issue (to them) - that's fine by me.
Of course, as it's purely a personal decision, I can reconsider my stance at any time - and even change my mind. So, based on my experiences, I don't buy Sony or Toyota, and I don't shop at B&Q. Your experiences will differ.
God: An invisible friend for grown-ups.
A little known fact: Windows notepad is actually a full clone of vi, albeit with some of the features disabled.
Other OS was removed for fiduciary duty to developers, as it is used as a successful attach vector: phase one to actively exploit the PS3 hypervisor.
It is nothing more and nothing less. I'm tired of fanboys projecting evil or other nebulous intent on to Sony when the truth is plainly evident.
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I think the PS2 / PS3 originally supported another OS more as a tax ruse than anything else, to sell their consoles as computers and therefore avoid import duties in Europe.
Why oh why does this rumor never die.
It wasn't Linux, it was YaBasic on the EU PS2's that was the attempt to get around the tariff. It failed, but the tariff was abolished shortly thereafter, BEFORE Linux on the PS2 or PS3.
Sony supported Linux because their preferred dev environment was Linux. Those PS2 dev TOOL machines ran Linux. RedHat 5 IIRC. Those GScubes that were basically 16 PS2's in parallel were controlled from a Linux machine. The similar Zego's ran Yellow Dog Linux.
I remember reading some complaint, perhaps on ars technica or gamasutra from a developer that the PS2 dev-machines didn't have good IDE's or documentation... some other guy said, "you've got GCC and vi, what more do you need?"
The licensing screen on the PS Vita says it is running a modification of FreeBSD too.
*Nix AND Mac joke all rolled into one? Someone give this Coward a cigar and positive mods!
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
Having a legal contract to shareholders, publishers, developers and retailers, and the legal framework through which to remove compromised features IS NOT EVIL. It's called responsible business practices and jurisprudence.
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What about to the people who bought the fucking things?
No legal framework can remove the evil from this, it is just theft. They should have offered refunds to the impacted buyers at the very least.
If they want to be able to do these sorts of things and not be evil, I suggest they rent the consoles out not sell them.
The EULA you "signed" digitally permits this. Furthermore, any argument predicated on you "physically owning the hardware" is moot. You do not, nor did you ever receive a license to access the hypervisor, to which access via Linux had to be removed to retain the "trusted computing" aspect of the platform.
If you think you bought the right to use a console's software (ie it's hypervisor, or a feature which runs in software on top of it) in any way you wish, you were grossly misinformed as a consumer. The only people aching over this (still ironically) are the ones who least understand what they bought, and what they received.
I DO expect more out of Linux gurus, who it would seem currently have not yet grown beyond utility balls and sand buckets.
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Here you go.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.