PlayStation 4 runs modified FreeBSD 9.0

http://www.vgleaks.com/some-details-about-playstation-4-os-development/

by jorgecastillo • 13 years ago

247 86 13 years ago

vgleaks.com

sciurus• 13 years ago

The original source (as far as I can tell) is http://www.vgleaks.com/some-details-about-playstation-4-os-d...

kryptiskt• 13 years ago

The PS3 also has FreeBSD onboard (they call their version CellOS or something), so this is not hugely surprising.

jevinskie2• 13 years ago

GameOS on the PS3 is Sony proprietary AFAIK. OtherOS was traditionally Linux but glevand the hacker (not glevand the SCE employee) got FreeBSD running as well. The hypervisor (lv1) is a modification of the IBM reference hypervisor.

profquail3• 13 years ago

According to Sony's licensing page, the PS3's OS is based on FreeBSD 8.2:

http://www.scei.co.jp/ps3-license/

They've also apparently used FreeBSD on the PS Vita:

http://www.scei.co.jp/psvita-license/

sigil• 13 years ago

Hey Sony, you should consider:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors

I guess they could be the big anonymous donor, although I always assumed that was Apple.

avar• 13 years ago

Why would any public company make anonymous donations? Isn't it going to become public anyway via public accounting? I'm not familiar with U.S. law in this regard.

bjterry• 13 years ago

A public company is not required to disclose its individual donations except insofar as they would be material to making an investment decision. The bar for that is tremendously high for a company like Apple or Sony relative to the size of any such donation.

gilgoomesh2• 13 years ago

Apple doesn't make many public donations as a matter of policy. Steve Jobs was famously against publicly declared donations – he thought it was hypocritical, stole credit from the recipients and diminished the concept of selfless giving.

http://www.news.com.au/money/money-matters/steve-jobs-secret...

phaus• 13 years ago

Not saying it applies in this case, but one reason might be religious belief. Certain parts of the bible discourage seeking attention for charitable acts.

dmix• 13 years ago

I guess they could be the big anonymous donor, although I always assumed that was Apple.

NSA? DHS?

josephg• 13 years ago

As someone who works on BSD-licensed opensource software, this is fantastic news. Regardless of your opinion of Sony as a company, this is exactly why I love licenses like BSD & MIT - you enable engineers everywhere to build better products.

zimbatm• 13 years ago

It would be interesting to know what made them choose that OS. Is it because FreeBSD was better adapted to their needs or because unlike Linux they wouldn't be forced to contribute back to the enormous pile of work that they inherit ? I hope it's the first one and that we'll soon see commits from Sony flowing in.

ceph_• 13 years ago

FreeBSD and Netbsd are often chosen due to the more permissive licensing agreements. They allow the revised platform to be fully commercial and proprietary. Another example would be Juniper's JunOS.

skreuzer• 13 years ago

Not sure if the license is the reason they choose FreeBSD, but they have made some contributions back to FreeBSD

A patch for AVX support was submitted from someone at Sony

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-amd64/2011-March/...

zvrba• 13 years ago

I don't think it has anything to do with the will to contribute something back.

You need a lawyer to do anything with GPL'd software in commercial setting, and even lawyers will sometimes disagree (e.g., what is a derivative work?). With BSD-licensed software you don't have to worry about lawyers. So which software do you pick?

4ad• 13 years ago

Everyone talks about licensing but nobody talks about technology. DTrace is something you'd want on such a device. We know that Sony is interested in DTrace, they ported to the PSP a few years back.

brvs2• 13 years ago

I prefer to use proprietary and closed-source software. But to each his own, I guess.

devcpp3• 13 years ago

So you don't care about backdoors, malware, who knows whatever else they may put in that code?

guard-of-terra3• 13 years ago

Do you prefer to write it all from scratch?

Because you can't materialize a new closed-source operating system in time for a console lifecycle without basing it upon some open source one.

So you don't have much choice: it's Microsoft or open source, and guess what? Microsoft already have a console of its own.

huxley• 13 years ago

It reminded me that 3 years ago Sony started working with GNUStep to add touch support and build their SNAP platform, they put the project on hold/cancelled it not long after it became public, but you can still see the code at: https://github.com/deliciousrobots/gnustep-gui-sony/

Some of the background: http://blog.deliciousrobots.com/2010/11/27/sonys-changes-to-...

synchronise• 13 years ago

Did any of these changes get merged back into upstream GNUStep?

elwin• 13 years ago

We aren’t sure if this will bring again the “Other OS” functions to Playstation 4

It will at least have to be possible to install other systems. The screenshots show GRUB 2, which is under the GPLv3, so it should be unlockable.

lotyrin• 13 years ago

Assuming it survives into the final commercial product.

zanny• 13 years ago

Worst case scenario, someone will rip out the rom chip and reverse engineer whatever kind of efi or acpi firmware they are using and solder their own in.

People get mad crazy with video game consoles like that.

gsnedders• 13 years ago

The devkit will be unlockable — but that's not interesting. What bootloader the devkit runs has no relation to what the final console will (and I expect that will be locked down, even if it allows other OSes).

runeks3• 13 years ago

Isn't the point that it has to be locked down? I get the impression that one of the merits of a gaming system is how well it protects unauthorized copying of game titles (seen from the game developers' point of view).

jjcm• 13 years ago

Any idea if this means there's a potential to play PS4 games on a standard linux box?

chc• 13 years ago

That seems pretty unlikely. The Mac OS X core operating system Darwin is also based off FreeBSD, but there's a whole lot on top of the core OS that they don't have in common, so Mac programs are not very easily ported.

merlincorey• 13 years ago

Darwin includes a separate kernel and binary image format.

The question is the Sony OS using regular ELFs and the FreeBSD kernel with modules, or did they replace it entirely as well.

IanChiles• 13 years ago

If someone wanted to build a PS4 ABI, much like how Wine works, there's a small chance that you could - but most likely not.

runeks3• 13 years ago

I'd say chances are pretty slim. They are only using the FreeBSD kernel. It's the stuff on top (graphics libraries, input handling) that really matters.

vvhn• 13 years ago

not strictly the FreeBSD kernel but the rather the BSD emulation layer ( which is quite a significant chunk of xnu ) on top of the Mach "microkernel" ( which until Mach 2.5 still ran in the kernel - Mach 3.0 moved the BSD emulation out to userspace). the "BSD emulation" started with 4.3 BSD and kept in sync with its successors but seems to have diverged quite a bit lately.

m_gloeckl• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that the final software for the console can differ from the OS that the development kit is running. The Playstation 2 development kit was running Red Hat Linux and shipped with a custom system software once it was released. The Playstation 3 development kit was also running Red Hat Linux, but it shipped with CellOS, an operating system that has supposedly been branched off of FreeBSD during development.

phryk• 13 years ago

mariusmg• 13 years ago

PS3 also used a BSD fork (called CellOS or something like this). I would have been impressed if they had they own embedded low footprint OS. Forking BSD and "eating" a lot of RAM for the OS in a game console is hardly interesting.

skizm• 13 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this just for the dev tools? I think the actual OS will be something different (although I assume some sort of Linux Kernel).

nathanb• 13 years ago

This article doesn't cite a source. I'd be interested to see more information.

(The article also claims that you could install Windows on your PS3, which I never tried but I'm reasonably certain would not in any way actually work).

osivertsson• 13 years ago

"It is a modified version of FreeBSD 9.0."

Is this obvious from the screenshots?

Or are they just claiming this without any arguments to back it up?

bni• 13 years ago

Seems like its common for Japanese consumer electronics companies to use FreeBSD as a base. For example the Panasonic plasma TVs of recent years contain FreeBSD.

PlayStation 4 runs modified FreeBSD 9.0

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