PlayStation 4 Will Be Running Modified FreeBSD 457
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."
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You would have to write a wrapper around the FreeBSD driver apis for Linux (this may already exist).
But the driver is probably specific to the card in the PS4, not a general purpose driver.
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You would have to write a wrapper around the FreeBSD driver apis for Linux (this may already exist).
Why? You could just run FreeBSD on that PC instead of Linux.
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So how trivial will it be to slurp the OS out onto a AMD card enabled PC and have our own "HackStation4"?
I'm assuming they meant using an AMD based PC because the drivers already in the PS4 OS might be compatible (which is not particularly likely). Alternatively if you want NVIDIA, they already have an official driver for FreeBSD that you could try hacking into Orbis. Neither case requires a custom Linux-FreeBSD shim.
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You just answered yourself. If you already have an AMD system, why not run Orbis on it, getting access to the games written for the PS4? Some might prefer to not get a second computer potentially with less but faster RAM.
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The PS4 is a loss leader. You might want to put Orbis on another system, but given that Orbis is specifically tuned for the PS4 hardware and hacking it to work on another much more costly system will likely lead to nothing of great value, in the end such a project will be just for the sake of a hobby.
I would go the other way, trying to get better hardware for cheap and putting a full OS on it.
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If you already have an AMD system, why not run Orbis on it, getting access to the games written for the PS4?
Because Orbis and the PS4 games are written for a very specific hardware configuration, not just any AMD system. It's a lot easier to optimize and squeeze performance out of a system when you know how much RAM you have, how much cache you have, what your bus speeds are, what your latencies are, number of shader processors, number of CPU cores, etc... and write software specifically to that configuration.
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Re:Sony Hackstation (Score:4, Insightful)
Not Worried about the piracy as I would buy games. . But if I could build a compatible P.C unencumbered by Sonys Restrictions and add other BSD/Linux software to the box, I would have a very happy lounge.
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The first Xbox ran on an Intel Celeron. No one has the Xbox OS running on a PC or vice-versa. The CPU is just a little part of the whole package that is a computer. Hell, the 360, Wii and Gamecube are all on fairly typical Power processors; at least not far from COTS chips.
Mac computers, on the other hand, are just like Windows computers running standard UEFI instead of BIOS.
Re:Sony Hackstation (Score:4, Informative)
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.
I don't think you know what that phrase means. So here you go: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/begging-the-question [yourlogicalfallacyis.com]
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Not So Fast. [wikipedia.org]
Really, I'm right there with you on this modern usage, I find it particularly irritating because it is not just a new usage it is basically the exact opposite of the historical meaning. But language changes no matter how much we might wish it to stay the same.
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If you do that you can run the dash. Yay.
That doesn't make you magically able to run games.
Re:Sony Hackstation (Score:4)
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?
Like a Hackintosh?
Apple will solve it by moving to ARM.
Sony can head off the problem by leveraging the TPM chip.
If your hardware doesn't have a machine key with Sony's digital signature on it, then OS doesn't boot.
Furthermore... no doubt UEFI secure boot will be leveraged, to prevent booting user supplied code on a PS4.
I anticipate the trusted computing hardware to be used extensively.
Re:Sony Hackstation (Score:4, Informative)
I'm amazed no one has said "HUMA" - Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access, and that this fundamental difference between the architecture of PCs and the PS4 is likely to make it an uphil struggle for PS4 emulation. It *may* be a different story when it comes to AMDs Kavari (?) APUs since they use a HUMA architecture themselves.
Personally I think the best to expect is that we may see more games ported to Linux ....
War of the Operating Systems (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re:War of the Operating Systems (Score:4, Informative)
It uses IOS.
Not Apple's iOS, but the "Internal Operating System"-note that capital I.
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Re:War of the Operating Systems (Score:5, Funny)
Unrouted wii ends up splattering all over the floor and on your shoes.
Re:War of the Operating Systems (Score:4, Informative)
MacOS X is a FreeBSD-derivitive.
No it isn't. Both OS X and FreeBSD are BSD4.3 derivatives. They were then updated with code from BSD4.4. When NeXTSTEP / OpenStep was rebranded as OS X, the userland was updated with code from NetBSD (another BSD4.3 derivative) as that code had more recent features and was very portable. Later on, the userland started to be updated with code from FreeBSD, since it had become more portable in the meantime.
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Hmm, but using a Mach kernel, not the FreeBSD kernel...
Mach is not being used as a kernel, it's not even being used as a microkernel. Mach is being used as a HAL. Process and memory management is still being handled by a traditional kernel on OSX, which is why it's not a microkernel operating system any more than NT.
A great win for FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:A great win for FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This man is in denial.
--
BMO
Re:A great win for FreeBSD (Score:5, Funny)
This man is in denial.
Well, to be fair, maybe they'll kick up the source code to github for a rootkit?
Re:A great win for FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This man is in denial.
-- BMO
Not really. It is much less expensive to allow the patches to be integrated into the parent project then it is to patch the project after every update. In addition, others will be able to test/verify that changes don't break the patches if they are given access to them. So it makes sense to feed back as many patches as they can as it greatly reduces the effort required to maintain their port.
Re:A great win for FreeBSD (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...
Re:A great win for FreeBSD (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it's the BSD license cheer-squad who are odd. you clap and cheer at something that does not benefit you, or anyone else (except Sony. or Apple. etc).
Here's the difference in outcomes with products using software under 1. GPL, 2. BSD, and 3. proprietary licenses:
1. with a GPL code-base, the user has the *right* to get, modify, use, and re-distribute the source code. the product manufactuer MUST release the source code to GPL-derived works under the same terms as the GPL. a win for the user and the world.
2. with a BSD licensed code-base, the user has no right to the source code, at all. the product manufacturer might voluntarily make some of their code public, under any licensing terms of their choosing. no benefit to the user or to the world.
3. with a proprietary code-base, the user has no right to the source code, at all. the product manufacturer might voluntarily make some of their code public, under any licensing terms of their choosing. no benefit to the user or to the world.
The outcomes of the last two cases are identical, so why cheer for something that has no practical benefit? bragging rights - especially when they're third-hand and your just a fanboy or a herd member who gets off on identifying with brand names - aren't worth much, if anything. they don't benefit the user, they don't benefit the public, they don't even benefit the original authors of the software who generously chose to use a BSD-style license.
(and, note, while I think the BSD license is inferior to the GPL for many reasons, I absolutely accept and endorse the authors' rights to choose that license for their software)
So, I don't even see any reason to care that Sony (or Apple or anyone ) chooses to base some of their products on BSD-licensed code. I certainly see no reason to think it's a Good Thing because it's NOT a Good Thing - at best, it's neutral because it just isn't relevant.
BTW, I'm really tired of seeing, as it was in this article, the BSD license described as being "more liberal" than the GPL. The *ONLY* "freedom" you get with the BSD license that you don't get with the GPL is the freedom to restrict the freedom of others. Claiming that that makes it "more liberal" is akin to saying that we had more freedom before the abolition of slavery because we hadn't had our freedom to own other people (and to treat our property in whatever manner we liked) restricted.
Freedom to oppress, to exploit, to be a parasitic leech are not freedoms worth having, let alone worth crowing about.
Re:A great win for FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)
If it wasn't for the fact that OpenSSH is BSD licensed, we'd still have TELNET all over the place. I benefit from that.
The same is true for every other standard internet service. TCP/IP, HTTPD, SMTP, DNS, DHCP, FTP, LDAP, NTP, etc. Just try to name one service that has become a defacto standard, which only had a GPL-licensed reference implementation... They don't exist.
I benefit from that, you benefit from that. And it's solely the domain of BSD/Apache-licensed software. NOT GPL'd software.
The right to get a tarball is of almost no practical value. Look at things like Xen, Android, Webkit, etc. A publicly available blob of code helps no one. It can't get integrated upstream without those companies going far above and beyond what the GPL requires. And if they go above and beyond what the GPL requires, there's no reason to believe they won't go far above and beyond what the BSD license requires.
It's in the companies' self-interest to release their code changes under the same license for upstream integration. And even if they chose not to, there's no HARM to the public or the contributors, as the upstream source is still available under the same license as always.
And with the BSD license, companies have the option to contribute in other ways if they can't release source code. Money to the upstream project is almost always more beneficial than a blob of changes. One example, while Apple may have locked-up their Darwin OS under a different license, they've still contributed plenty back to BSD. LLVM comes to mind, but there are many others as well.
It's not FREEDOM to compel others to give their hard work to you, for free. And others choosing not to do so, does NOT imping upon your own FREEDOM. You had the same amount of freedom before and after they used some BSD licensed code in their own project. The GPL may just as well have a clause saying you must donate X dollars to the FSF if you want to use the software. You seem to think it's "FREEDOM" when penalizing anyone who uses GPL software, so that should be just as good...
And you should be very careful with that line of thinking... The GPLv3 has been a flaming pile of failure, because it forced too many demands upon those who wished to use licensed code. It caused a surge of BSD development, most notably projects like LLVM which are on-course to replace GCC, all despite not having a license that forces people to support the project.
Re:A great win for FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, I'm really tired of seeing, as it was in this article, the BSD license described as being "more liberal" than the GPL. The *ONLY* "freedom" you get with the BSD license that you don't get with the GPL is the freedom to restrict the freedom of others. Claiming that that makes it "more liberal" is akin to saying that we had more freedom before the abolition of slavery because we hadn't had our freedom to own other people (and to treat our property in whatever manner we liked) restricted
I receive some software under GPL. Let G be the set of all things the license allows me to do with/to the software.
I receive some software under BSD. Let B be the set of all things the license allows me to do with/to the software.
G is a strict subset of B.
Hence, B has a more liberal license than G.
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It's publicity. Awareness of FreeBSD will increase, and that could translate into more users. Likely more users of the kind that are curious, inquisitive, and technically able.
Like you, I very much doubt that Sony will feed back any patches. Corporate structure means that the process of sharing code will include a series of approvals and legal checks, making the whole process painful for the programmer. No tech guy worth their salt wants to put themselves through that wringer, unless they're really real
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It's publicity. Awareness of FreeBSD will increase, and that could translate into more users.
In what universe will this happen?
In this universe, very few users will ever know that it runs FreeBSD, and even fewer will care. Much like most people don't know that the PSP runs FreeBSD (did you?), and even fewer care.
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Errata: That should be "that the PSP runs NetBSD".
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Thanks for the comment, my glass-half-empty friend.
Right now, somewhere, some kid with an eager mind has discovered the name of "FreeBSD" because of this story. Should they continue the investigation, fuelled by the insatiable curiosity that is the hallmark of younger generations, he or she will install FreeBSD onto their computer system. From there, the questions only grow, as they delve into its inner workings. It could be a life changing discovery. Only the future can tell.
Most people are unaware of
Re:A great win for FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
[...]since Sony is probably not going to give back any of the new stuff they've written[...]
I expect that they will donate back all of their tactical code, and enough of the pieces of their strategic code to make the tactical code desirable to integrate from the FreeBSD community. I expect they will NOT donate back ALL of their strategic code.
The business case for them doing this is that they will be able to offload the maintenance burden for the tactical code, which does not benefit them commercially, to the FreeBSD community, while keeping their proprietary intellectual property to themselves.
Apple did the same thing when doing the UNIX conformance; my team donated back code and test sets to more than 150 Open Source projects to enable them to be standards conformant, and, in the case of the test sets, to continue to be standards conformant going forward.
This would get a lot more press, if Apple employees were ever allowed to publish anything without VP approval. If Sony is smart, they will absolutely crow about their contributions back to the community, since the secrecy buys them nothing, and being candid aboit it gets them nothing but good press. It's too bad Apple was never candid about its contributions.
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It is good because it shows that BSD is not just viable but desirable for commercial use. Also, what do you base your assertion that Sony will not give back any modifications they have made? I'm not suggesting they will release the entire modified OS but it would not be too much of a reach to see them post a few bug patches, othewise they will need to keep making the same corrections after every release.
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Also, what do you base your assertion that Sony will not give back any modifications they have made?
What's the benefit to Sony's shareholders in doing so that outweighs the costs and risks?
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Voluntary is fine, no need to change licenses.
Even if they don't send in any patches, FreeBSD probably comes out ahead just from the exposure.
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You expect, but it's not at all required. If you want code back, use a different license.
Many commercial vendors using BSD in closed environments do in fact have a track record of giving code back, contributing fixes, etc. A current notable example is Apple. They have submitted patches to BSD projects they use, they have released some of their internally developed projects.
Nice! (Score:2)
The fact that game developers will be able to recruit people who have several years of experience with the base of the underlying OS should result in better code than the usual half-assed guesswork near the beginning of a console's lifetime.
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The fact that game developers will be able to recruit people who have several years of experience with the base of the underlying OS should result in better code than the usual half-assed guesswork near the beginning of a console's lifetime.
I'd imagine that the "It's just an x86 with a relatively recent Radeon, you may have heard of those" factor will have a major role there... This will be the first (non portable, the portables have been less weird) Sony console in generations that isn't a serious oddball in terms of silicon.
Will Sony Release Any Source Code? (Score:2)
Is there *any* hope that Sony will push patches upstream? I would imagine not, but it would certainly be a nice gesture and could result in more PS4 sales if they did.
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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.
Re:Will Sony Release Any Source Code? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Jobs Told IBM and Sony Where to Stick Cell (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [nytimes.com]
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 [cnn.com]
Re:Jobs Told IBM and Sony Where to Stick Cell (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.
Re:Yep (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Microsoft should go with Xenix (Score:5, Funny)
Pipe dream. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It was advertised that you could use other OS on the Sony PS3. There were reports of 3-letter agencies building clusters out of them because of their Cell processors (this was at a time when GPGPU computer was just starting to become big)
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there are plenty of citations in the class action complaint. http://ps3movies.ign.com/ps3/document/article/108/1086720/gov.uscourts.cand.226894.1.0.pdf [ign.com]
Confirm THAT, Netcraft (Score:5, Funny)
Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
Gee, now Sony can use... (Score:2)
...(an)Other OS to screw users out of being able to use OtherOS!
The PlayStation 3 supposedly used FreeBSD too (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
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If you look at the copyright messages on the console itself you can get more useful/accurate information than that.
So to be clear, you're just believing whatever the print says, and not relying on binary forensics? History has demonstrated that those who trust Sony are idiots.
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So to be clear, you're just believing whatever the print says, and not relying on binary forensics?
You don't have to go that far, even. A sibling to the GP linked this page [scei.co.jp]. BSD with Attribution Clause has some value, I suppose.
Sony grows up (Score:3)
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.
Re:License war commencing... (Score:5, Informative)
BSD license, I'm not sure you understand it.
Re:License war commencing... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:License war commencing... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not biting. ;D
Re:License war commencing... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:License war commencing... (Score:5, Funny)
I heard on the internets that version 6 of Emacs was going to be called VI
Re:License war commencing... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:License war commencing... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:License war commencing... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:License war commencing... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:License war commencing... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Re:Except... (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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Since the original BSD license is a year (1988) older than the GPL v1, it's not possible for BSD to have been released under the GPL.
Re:License war commencing... (Score:5, Funny)
There aren't even many Linux Zealots left.
No need to gloat when you've conquered the world.
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Are there any Sony fanboys here? I only see negative comments about them.
Re:License war commencing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:License war commencing... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 a
Re:License war commencing... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:License war commencing... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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. T
Re: (Score:3)
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
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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 co
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Here [archive.org] you go.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
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so many people bash ati but i ran a gaming rig for 5 trouble free years though eventually when i was convinced it was viraly infected (despite concrete proof of it being fine) so i sold it. problem fixed. i had previously dealt with 2-3 ati aiw cards that the systems installed in them became 'obsolete' never any crash issues. i bought one asus nvidia card and the heatsink wasn't even touching the gpu bolted on the card. cause everyone was saying 'go nvidia' the 5 year fine system was the one that got the at
No, AMD still has problems (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Those are all recent popular titles. You need to look a bit harder