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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.