[HN Gopher] Linux on the Xbox 360
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Linux on the Xbox 360
Author : zdw
Score : 137 points
Date : 2023-06-05 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lilysthings.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lilysthings.org)
| treesciencebot wrote:
| Modern XBOX Series X and S has very nice hardware (custom AMD
| APUs) for a really really discounted price. I wonder when or if
| they can be bricked enough to be a viable linux computer that can
| be sold for ~250$ ish with a great performance.
| numpad0 wrote:
| This talk[1] was interesting watch wrt that. They _made DRAM
| encrypted_ and Secure Boot seems to be done right too...
|
| 1: https://youtu.be/U7VwtOrwceo
| [deleted]
| selectodude wrote:
| I have an Xbox One X that would be nice as a second PC. Even if
| it was an irreversible process that allowed me to install
| Windows, it would at least keep it out of the landfill for a
| little while longer.
| RajT88 wrote:
| XBoneX would make for a nice dedicated Left4Dead box.
|
| You can also stream your PC games to the Xbox:
|
| https://www.purexbox.com/news/2021/02/guide_how_to_mirror_yo.
| ..
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| That reminds me of that 200k reward for running Linux on the
| original XBox.
| https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/02/200k_prize_offered_fo...
| tslmy wrote:
| Hi author,
|
| I really enjoy concepts like these that scavenge the most value
| from obsolete items / things you can get (almost) for free. (I
| used to build really cheap computers for kids who can't afford
| them.) I also love ideas that makes a special-purpose device
| available for general computing.
|
| Have fun, and keep up with the good work! :D
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Tangential: back in the day, installing a modchip in the original
| Xbox to boot Linux was a nice way to get a cheap Linux box. 64MB
| RAM were a bit tight when 256MB were pretty much the norm, but
| otherwise the machine was quite powerful for its price.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| GentooX was fun. Still miss it a bit.
| znpy wrote:
| ah, fun times. i remember interviewing the guy behind the
| project, a very nice person.
|
| also i remember there was a modified boot loader (chromwell,
| iirc?) and some person had managed to solder an additional 64mb
| chip to bring the total memory to a whopping 128MB.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > I couldn't do stage 2 on my laptop because that involves
| chrooting into the install and unfortunately my laptop isn't
| powerpc.
|
| For people doing similar projects, you can use qemu in user mode
| to work around this. I believe the relevant Debian package is
| qemu-user-static. With it, you can execute binaries from foreign
| architectures as if they're native, with software translation
| doing all the hard work for you. Think Rosetta (not Rosetta2) but
| on Linux and supporting a wide variety of hardware.
|
| Install the package, copy /usr/bin/qemu-<target
| architecture>-static to the /usr/bin folder in your chroot and
| you should be able to chroot into the foreign system!
|
| I've used this to analyze some ARM binaries pulled from a router
| and it works surprisingly effective. Applications may fail
| because of the version inconsistencies between the daemons
| running on your OS and the old versions the chroot expects, but
| for basic tools it should Just Work, really.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| systemd-nspawn is also worth looking into
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| How would that work? The problem here is that chroot needs to
| run using a different CPU instruction set. qemu-user is
| exactly the right answer here.
|
| According to e.g. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Systemd-nspawn
| "no hardware emulation is taking place and unlike QEMU and
| Virtualbox non-native CPU instruction sets are not directly
| supported".
| dijit wrote:
| systemd-nspawn is still using binfmt which is how Linux
| tries to read ELF files, and what you really want when
| executing other architectures is to teach binfmt about
| qemu.
|
| nspawn doesn't do anything additional here, but might be
| easier for most new sysadmins (sorry...
| "devops/platform/cloud engineers").
|
| More info (from 2016 so it could be out of date):
| https://blog.oddbit.com/post/2016-02-07-systemd-nspawn-
| for-f...
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| cd into an OS image built for arm on your x86 dev machine,
| and type:
|
| `systemd-nspawn -D .`
|
| and it just works. At least it's never failed for me. I
| believe it pulls in some kind of binfmt/qemu shim to get
| these binaries working. Probably qemu under the hood, but
| this is about as plug-n-play as it gets.
| [deleted]
| SierraOne wrote:
| [dead]
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >The next part will be about Linux on the PS3.
|
| Uh, that should be a link?
|
| http://ps3linux.net/
| dotBen wrote:
| This reminds me of back in the day when the US became very
| worried that the 'level of sophisticated computing power' in the
| then-recently released PlayStation 2 could be used by Iran or
| North Korea to power nuclear missile guidance systems, if Linux
| could be installed on the box. What was especially weird was that
| Sony then went ahead and released Linux for the PS2 anyway which
| made no commercial sense anyway!
|
| At the time there were particularly tight restrictions on
| distribution of PS2, beyond the usual export embargo of any tech
| to these countries.
|
| UPDATE: If this interests you, here's a whole page explaining the
| weird history here: https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-
| how-concerns-about...
| RajT88 wrote:
| Wasn't Linux on the PS2 some way for Sony to recruit engineers?
|
| I thought I heard something to that effect - people who bought
| the linux kit got headhunting calls 9-12 months later.
| comprev wrote:
| That's a pretty imaginative method for recruitment. If you're
| nerdy enough to want to install Linux on a games console,
| maybe you'd like to get paid for it!
| rejectfinite wrote:
| Also for taxes
|
| https://www.gamespot.com/articles/uk-court-ps2-is-no-
| compute...
| wildzzz wrote:
| I've always heard the PS2 Linux kit was to defeat some higher
| tariffs on importation of video game consoles versus the lower
| ones on personal computers. Some editions of the PS2 came with
| the network module pre-installed so maybe even without the HDD
| necessary, it could still loosely be defined as a PC since all
| that is missing is software that could easily be downloaded and
| installed.
| cardanome wrote:
| Yeah for the same reason, European PS2 versions shipped with
| a Demo-Disc containing a dialect of BASIC.[0]
|
| I don't think anyone ever made proper games with it but as a
| kid I really enjoyed playing around with it and making my
| first programming baby steps.
|
| [0] https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/07/sony_adds_basic_to
| _pl...
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Given the RROD, I don't think its worth putting time into
| Xbox360. Unless there has been some development on the 360
| hardware, I doubt people will be using theirs for too long.
|
| I went through 4 RRODs before the final RROD was in 2019.
|
| I thought that xbox360 was going to be pals with my son at my
| parents...
| yomlica8 wrote:
| Went to fire up my old 360 that was in the basement to play
| some old kinetic dance game with the kids. RROD. Seemed a waste
| to throw more good money/time after bad trying to fix it.
| babypuncher wrote:
| RROD hasn't really been much of a thing since the older fat
| models. If you have a slim Xbox 360 you're basically golden.
|
| Corona, Jasper, and Trinity boards are widely considered the
| most reliable revisions. This coveres late fat and all slim
| models produced from ~2008 up to 2013. The "E" model introduced
| in 2013 is also pretty reliable, but some units are not good
| for modding.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Yeah, I thought RRODs were less frequent with units made
| after 2010. The S and E models?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_360_retail_config.
| ..
| babypuncher wrote:
| They started becoming less prevalent throughout 2008, as
| manufacturers got better at working with RoHS-compliant
| solder and die shrinks meant less heat.
|
| However, the failure rate for the early models was only
| 25%. An astronomically high number for any consumer
| electronic and 10x that of the Nintendo Wii, but still a
| minority of consoles. Plenty of people got "bad" consoles
| in 2006, 2007 and didn't have a failure until 2009 or 2010.
| There were also plenty of "refurbished" consoles floating
| around game stores and ebay for years that would eventually
| fail again.
| codepoet80 wrote:
| My 2016 XBox 360 still runs great. Watched a HD-DVD off it just
| yesterday!
| robotnikman wrote:
| >HD-DVD
|
| I nearly forgot how HD-DVD used to be a thing. I remember
| back when HD-DVD was surpassed by bluray, they had a whole
| shelf of those Xbox 360 HD-DVD drives on fire sale at Fry's
| electronics (RIP) for $10.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| The real serious RROD on the 360 was caused by failure of the
| solder joints between the GPU flip-chip and the substrate due
| to thermal cycling. Since this linux install won't ever utilize
| the GPU of the 360 in a way that would get it very hot (or if
| the number of thermal cycles is just kept very low in total,
| that failure mode may simply never be an issue.
|
| And this is definitely the type of project someone is doing for
| fun anyway. Unfortunately even at idle the 360 isn't super
| power efficient, drawing ~70 watts or more, or else this could
| actually be a pretty neat project for repurposing a 360 as a
| NAS or something.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Wow, I forgot about that. I remember there was a last-ditch
| hack to try and resurrect a RRODed 360 which was to wrap a
| towel around it to force it to overheat, thus (possibly) re-
| melting the solder joints. This worked for us once, but only
| for a short time and subsequent towel-hacks did not bring it
| back. They did eventually release a new version of the 360
| that doesn't RROD, which I eventually bought (realistically
| MS should have given these out to customers who experienced
| RRODs for free, but of course they had to scam kids out of
| whatever little money they had).
|
| Now that I have a series X, the "only" major problem is that
| microsoft's controllers interfere with every wireless headset
| I've tried (including Microsoft's own wireless headset) super
| consistently (yes, everything has updated firmware). I'm sure
| hardware development isn't easy, but microsoft seems reliably
| bad at it.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > They did eventually release a new version of the 360 that
| doesn't RROD, which I eventually bought (realistically MS
| should have given these out to customers who experienced
| RRODs for free, but of course they had to scam kids out of
| whatever little money they had).
|
| They did? They had a very generous policy where you were
| covered for three years after purchase, in which time they
| would repair or replace the hardware free of charge. If you
| RRoD'd in the later span of that, you would almost
| definitely have received an improved model (rather than
| them bothering to repair yours).
| wolrah wrote:
| > They did? They had a very generous policy where you
| were covered for three years after purchase, in which
| time they would repair or replace the hardware free of
| charge. If you RRoD'd in the later span of that, you
| would almost definitely have received an improved model
| (rather than them bothering to repair yours).
|
| There were two refreshes of the "Fat" 360 generation
| trying to resolve the RRoD issue, and as you might guess
| the first one helped but didn't solve the problem.
| Unfortunately for early adopters, the first refresh was
| where HDMI was added and while a non-HDMI version of that
| board was created for warranty repair use the same never
| happened for the second refresh. If you bought an early
| Xbox 360 that didn't have HDMI ports you were never going
| to get a completely fixed box unless you managed to get
| support to just replace it entirely with a new one.
| linusg789 wrote:
| There are some near end-of-life Xbox 360 models that are less
| prone to RROD's, but i'm not sure if you could still install
| linux/modchips on the newer ones. I think they put more
| security on those.
| tslmy wrote:
| IMHO The point of this project wasn't for practicality; it's
| for fun in the process.
|
| For a hacker like the author, anything is a good learning
| practice and thus good time spent.
|
| That being said, you have a good point -- For people really
| looking for a serious alternative to computers, they shouldn't
| look too deep into Xbox 360. Thanks for putting the warning
| about RROD here. You've added a valuable warning sign to the
| original content.
| wolrah wrote:
| > Given the RROD, I don't think its worth putting time into
| Xbox360. Unless there has been some development on the 360
| hardware, I doubt people will be using theirs for too long.
|
| You're 15 years behind on this one.
|
| While the original "Xenon" Xbox 360s are probably almost all
| dead by now, as are the first-gen Elites with the "Zephyr"
| board, the late-2007 "Falcon" revision that brought HDMI to the
| mass market models was a significant improvement and the
| late-2008 "Jasper" revision basically solved the problem. RRoDs
| on "Phat" consoles with the Jasper boards or any of the "Slim"
| variants are incredibly rare and unrelated to the flaw that
| impacted older revisions.
|
| My own anecdotal experience matches the internet reports as
| well. I was deep in the OG Xbox modding world so a lot of my
| friends are also big Xbox fans and as a result we've owned a
| lot of Xbox 360s. As far as I'm aware no one I know still has a
| functioning Xenon or Zephyr. Falcon and Opus are roughly 50/50,
| and I don't know of a single Jasper or later console that has
| failed randomly. A few have been taken out through obvious
| external forces like lightning, children, and/or gravity but
| nothing like the earlier consoles where you could just be
| playing a game, it freezes, reboots, and then the lights we all
| feared come on.
|
| A bunch of those consoles now have succumbed to optical drive
| failures and most of the rest are getting pickier about what
| discs they'll load, but that's an entirely different thing
| common to all sorts of older hardware. All those machines still
| play any games you want to off the hard drive.
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