FreeBSD 4 Bug may be present in Playstation 4/5

https://wololo.net/2024/02/01/is-an-18-year-old-vulnerability-the-key-to-the-next-ps5-ps4-jailbreak/

by gotschi_ • 2 years ago

143 65 2 years ago

tiffanyh4• 2 years ago

FreeBSD 4.x was considered by many as the most stable FreeBSD ever.

Mainly because there were 11 point releases of fixes and enhancements (4.11), as opposed to today where FreeBSD major version only have 3-4 point releases.

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/

datadeft• 2 years ago

Wasn't this the last version before Matthew Dillon forked the project? I remember seeing some public arguments about SMP and few details of the kernel that resulted in fork and the new version 5.x.

throwaway712712• 2 years ago

yea: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-Jul...

throw0101d3• 2 years ago

Mainly because there were 11 point releases of fixes and enhancements (4.11), as opposed to today where FreeBSD major version only have 3-4 point releases.

Mostly because 5.x took so long to be released.

IIRC, shortly after this experience the FreeBSD folks went from a feature-based release cycle to a time-based release cycle: everyone wanted feature X (and X and Y) in Next Release, and things got pushed and pushed.

So by having a steady cadence, a feature could be integrated regularly into HEAD, and folks didn't have to wait too long before a STABLE release was cut with all the latest and greatest stuff (that couldn't otherwise be backported because of compatibility guarantees).

sgift• 2 years ago

Same experience which lead Java to change from feature-based release cycle to time-based release cycle later. Make regular releases, everything that is ready gets included, everything else can go onto the next train. Far better.

zare_st• 2 years ago

Yeah a lot has changed since then. We had to keep track of stable branch to get close to Linux desktop features most of the time, sometimes even 'current' branch. Today you can use release for 99.9% of use cases, and upgrading releases minor or major is pretty straightforward and way faster than it used to be.

adrian_b3• 2 years ago

It was not only the most stable, but for many applications, especially in networking, it was also the fastest single-threaded operating system, beating easily Linux and Windows XP or 2000.

Unfortunately for FreeBSD, the launch of the Intel Pentium 4 with hyper-threading in 2003, then of the AMD dual-core CPUs in 2005 have made quickly FreeBSD 4 completely obsolete.

The smaller FreeBSD team has required many years until achieving a decent implementation for multi-threaded CPUs and during that time they have remained long behind Linux and other operating systems.

Besides perfect stability (it was normal to not reboot FreeBSD 4 for years) and great networking performance, it also had a much more reliable file system than the competition.

Despite the fact that Windows XP used NTFS and Linux had at least 3 file systems with journaling at that time, where journaling was supposed to make the file systems crash-resistant, I have seen at that time (around 1999-2003) many cases of file system corruptions after power outages, on computers without UPSes which used NTFS or Linux file systems with journaling (on Linux EXT2 without journaling any power outage was very likely to require a complete reinstallation).

During the same power outages, the computers with FreeBSD that used the UFS file system with "soft updates" never experienced any file system corruption, despite the fact that UFS with "soft updates" was not a journaling file system, but only one where the disk write operations were carefully ordered in such a way as to prevent unrecoverable file system corruption in the case of a crash.

hn8305823• 2 years ago

I've only ever lost data on Linux ext* filesystems, never on FreeBSD UFS or ZFS.

20 years ago it was unfortunately not unusual to experience the Linux "nuclear fsck" where it scrolls by so fast and for so long you know it's toast.

SomeoneFromCA9• 2 years ago

I recently booted old (Freebsd 12) VM and was surprised how _much_ more performant (vs debian) its tcp stack is, even when just browsing.

toast0• 2 years ago

Unfortunately for FreeBSD, the launch of the Intel Pentium 4 with hyper-threading in 2003, then of the AMD dual-core CPUs in 2005 have made quickly FreeBSD 4 completely obsolete.

FreeBSD 4 wasn't too bad on dual cpu systems, as I recall. Fine grained locking gets more important as cpu counts grow, of course, but at 2, the single Giant lock isn't unreasonable.

retrac• 2 years ago

required many years until achieving a decent implementation for multi-threaded CPUs and during that time they have remained long behind Linux and other operating systems

Many OSes at the time had hitches with SMP. BSD was one of them. FreeBSD had SMP in 4.x but almost everything in the kernel was single-threaded and the kernel thread was a major bottleneck.

FreeBSD wasn't alone in this. Linux suffered from a similar problem at the time, also because of the driver architecture. (The infamous "big kernel lock" wasn't fully eliminated until 2011: https://kernelnewbies.org/BigKernelLock)

This is an area where NT was much better, or VMS, or Solaris. And yes, the SMP issue, in hindsight, does partly explain why both Linux and BSD weren't as historically attractive as they otherwise looked, for large systems.

hulitu6• 2 years ago

but for many applications, especially in networking, it was also the fastest single-threaded operating system

If it is single threaded, how does this relates to PS4 and PS5 ?

nachteilig• 2 years ago

I loved FreeBSD 4. Stable and the first I really deployed wisely. Still have good memories of building world!

makeitdouble2• 2 years ago

That's also the period Yahoo and other companies had a tremendous investment in FreeBSD.

FreeBSD is great on its own, and that amount of attention also meant every single bit of performance would be extracted no matter what it takes, and any scaling or stability issues would be hammered out pretty quick.

Until they moved to redhat...

znpy3• 2 years ago

Until they moved to redhat...

Does anybody know why they switched to RedHat ?

loeg• 2 years ago

Likely also by comparison to FreeBSD 5 directly after it, which introduced concurrent kernel entry (instead of a single giant lock) and was considered somewhat buggy for a while. Or so I am told.

0x457• 2 years ago

5.x was extremely buggy and unstable. It got usable around only after 5.4 release.

5.x wasn't just the removal of Giant Lock, but also:

- GEOM - Kernel Scheduled Entities

There weren't any reasons to switch from 4.x to 5.x until 5.x got stable. Even with Giant Lock given the hardware at the time (Pentium with hyper threading) it wasn't that bad.

vehemenz• 2 years ago

I never looked into the release history, but I ran a server with 4.10 for 8 or 9 years and never felt the need to upgrade it.

WhereIsTheTruth2• 2 years ago

Time to buy a PS5 before this gets patched!

speps• 2 years ago

It's already patched:

Early tests seem to indicate that a crash is indeed present in PS4 up to 11.00 included, and PS5 8.20 included. (Which would put the patch for this issue at firmwares PS5 8.40 and PS4 11.02)

WhereIsTheTruth2• 2 years ago

Not the ones sitting in the store

MuffinFlavored• 2 years ago

I wonder if that's how the "hacker community" knew to look for it, doing a diff of what gets "flashed" 8.20 -> 8.40?

hulitu6• 2 years ago

OT. Can we ban "may" and "could" from submission titles ? It will greatly increase the quality of articles on HN.

bdhcuidbebe2• 2 years ago

ps5 was jailbroken recently so theres some merit to this claim

wololo has been reporting in it, and mvg made a video about current state of things

https://youtu.be/5Cq3K9lBli0

zogrodea• 2 years ago

I read the article and found it interesting to be honest (and enjoyed reading people's comments here on their experience with FreeBSD), although it is a rumour and I agree there are good reasons for disallowing/filtering those.

FreeBSD 4 Bug may be present in Playstation 4/5

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