[HN Gopher] Linux for Playstation 2
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Linux for Playstation 2
Author : swatson741
Score : 105 points
Date : 2024-01-28 08:26 UTC (1 days ago)
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| pjmlp wrote:
| It was a great indie development community, gaining experience on
| what it meant a console like dev experience, sadly spoiled by
| tons of folks porting emulators instead of being creative.
|
| Most like the reasoning behind PS3 Linux no longer having GPU
| libraries like the PS2Linux, only 2D acceleration, and eventually
| migration to FreeBSD as basis for PlayStation OS from PS4
| onwards.
|
| Still have my PS2Linux kit.
| incrudible wrote:
| Was it not always about a tax loophole that applied to PCs,
| that went away during the PS3 era?
|
| https://www.tfw2005.com/boards/threads/why-the-ps3-is-a-comp...
| pjmlp wrote:
| PS2Linux was the evolution of Net Yaroze introduced in the
| PlayStation 1.
|
| What PlayStation had into that sense was the demo disc
| shipped with the Playstation 2, that had a BASIC environment
| like on the 8 bit home computer days, called Yabasic.
|
| Here is a demo about it,
|
| "How/Why Sony Classed the PlayStation 2 as a Home Computer -
| Demo of Yabasic"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnXpzczPc38
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I have both. I had a lot more fun with the Yaroze. Even
| splashed out the extra cash to get codewarrior for it.
| goosedragons wrote:
| The PS3 also uses FreeBSD as the basis for it's OS. They don't
| want to use Linux for the main OS because of the license.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > tons of folks porting emulators instead of being creative
|
| On one hand this is something that annoys me a bit to this day
| - i am into original xbox homebrew games (bought a modded one
| last year specifically for this) and pretty much 99.999% of the
| homebrew software is emulators. While i can see the point until
| around mid-2000s due to the available hardware back then,
| emulators are by far the main target for any jailbroken console
| to this day[0], including modern ones - and i fail to see the
| point for that considering the availability and TV connectivity
| of cheap PCs (including some who are very small and yet very
| fast like those by beelink) or even Raspberry Pis, etc (not to
| mention way more versatile).
|
| On the other hand it is because of the effort people put into
| these projects that everyone else who isn't interested into
| emulators (e.g. me) still have the tools and ability to use the
| hardware as they please instead of it becoming useless ewaste.
|
| [0] the main exception, for whatever reason, seems to be
| Dreamcast. And very old consoles like NES, SNES, Gameboy, etc
| of course.
| coldpie wrote:
| > and i fail to see the point for that considering the
| availability and TV connectivity of cheap PCs
|
| It's a fair point. I think part of the appeal is, after
| you've finished the hack, you get both the emulators and the
| "just works" experience of a console. The controllers are
| high quality, sync correctly, and don't get disconnected; the
| UI is sane and just works out of the box; it will negotiate
| with any TV and audio setup correctly; you don't have to deal
| with OS updates breaking your setup or fiddle with any CLI-
| commands.
|
| > everyone else who isn't interested into emulators (e.g. me)
|
| You might get a kick out of this, I made two homebrew games
| for PSP back in high school. They run well in PPSSPP, if you
| don't have the original hardware handy. I'm still quite proud
| of them. https://coldpie.itch.io/
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I think most jailbroken consoles these days are more of a
| PITA to get working though - e.g. updates will either have
| stopped anyway or if they're still been released, they may
| stop the jailbreak from working. Older consoles' gamepads
| also tend to not be in a great quality after deteriorating
| over the years (in fact the gamepad i got with my og xbox
| was in terrible condition with a non-working left trigger,
| though fortunately RetroFighters made a new one which i
| preordered), etc. Personally i think an emulator running on
| a tiny PC or Raspberry Pi connected to a TV with HDMI is
| going to be much easier and viable long term.
|
| Though if you already have the console sitting there anyway
| might as well use it, but i think even the "easiest" option
| - Xbox Series X/S (which officially allows you to install
| your own programs) - is still not that seamless.
|
| > You might get a kick out of this, I made two homebrew
| games for PSP back in high school. They run well in PPSSPP,
| if you don't have the original hardware handy.
|
| Neat, i downloaded them and i'll check them out. Note BTW
| that the dev diary links seem to be broken for both games.
| coldpie wrote:
| > Note BTW that the dev diary links seem to be broken for
| both games.
|
| Ha! Yeah they were hosted on the website I set up in the
| mid-2000s and finally let expire. I wonder if they're on
| the Internet Archive, I'll update the links sometime.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| The PS3 also ran FreeBSD as its base OS
| tetris11 wrote:
| It looks like it's EOL. Can they not merge their changes
| upstream?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not at all, most of it used some blobs that were under Sony's
| NDA.
|
| Note that nowadays Sony uses FreeBSD and clang for a reason.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > It looks like it's EOL.
|
| "EOL" would imply that it ever received any ongoing support.
| The impression I get is more that Sony treated this more like a
| game release -- once the discs went out the door, that was it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The community was alive during around 7 years, and there were
| SCEE people active in the forums on Sony's payroll, like
| sarahe.
| uyjulian wrote:
| Someone did a port to a newer Linux base, and upstreaming is in
| progress: https://github.com/frno7/linux
| Slapshot_gd wrote:
| I absolutely loved playing around with that kit, I remember
| porting our IPTV middleware to it as a PoC a long time ago, was
| fun for demos :)
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| PS2 Linux is one of those things I knew about at the time, was
| super interested in yet never pursued (didn't have the means to)
| and now wish I had. It doesn't seem like a very practical
| computing environment even for the time, but that's part of what
| makes it so damn interesting.
| pbiggar wrote:
| I worked on this a bit! As an summer intern at SCEE in 2004, I
| port the Eyetoy driver to PS2 linux. Sadly, it had some legal
| issues due to some proprietary code in the original drivers, and
| it ended up not getting released.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| If you didn't know, this was primarily a tax dodge for the EU.
| Since it ran Linux, they felt they could classify the PlayStation
| 2 as a general-purpose computer, which receives a lower tariff
| rate than game consoles. PlayStation 3 had OtherOS for the same
| purpose, until the EU rejected the claim and reclassified it as a
| game console, and then Sony pulled support for OtherOS (it also
| being primarily a vehicle for piracy certainly didn't help).
| gumby wrote:
| I can tell you that support for this went all the way up to Ken
| Kutaragi. I discussed it with him. He was also responsible for
| the Ethernet port. He had real vision for the platform.
|
| It was more than a tax dodge.
| ppseafield wrote:
| For the PlayStation 3, another thing driving Linux's removal
| was that organizations were buying PS3s to use in data centers.
| But Sony sold them at a loss (IIRC over $100/unit loss, even
| being sold at $600 twenty years ago) and intended to make it up
| on revenue from games sold. They also didn't have nearly enough
| at launch because they were using a brand new processor
| (designed with help from IBM) and a brand new Blu-Ray disc
| format. That slowed down their initial production, and it had
| to launch in time to compete with the Xbox 360 (Pre-Christmas
| 2005), which also had a HD-DVD attachment.
|
| Notably, the PS3 at launch was actually cheaper than some
| dedicated Blu-ray players, so some home theater enthusiasts
| bought them (few to no games), eating into Sony's revenue even
| more. It took several years for the PS3 to be profitable, but
| it won the format war.
| chasil wrote:
| They should have sold a datacenter version, without the
| optical disc, with a copy of AIX and/or BSD, with an OS
| license of $200 (or at least under $1,000).
|
| It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just
| blades and embedded.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
| ppseafield wrote:
| A hypothetical Datacenter version might have skipped the
| optical drive, perhaps cutting down on their losses. At
| launch I doubt they would have had enough spare processors
| to build them without cutting into their PS3 production
| capacity.
|
| Additionally many game studios reported difficulty in
| writing for the PS3's processor compared to the Xbox, which
| had gone with a processor pretty similar to most PCs at the
| time. So by the time they had ramped up the capacity to
| make enough to meet PS3 demand, there were several years of
| worse/less performant PS3 versions of games developed for
| multiple platforms, making Sony's console look worse. It
| would have been a tough sell internally for the PS4 to use
| a custom processor architecture again, so they opted not
| to. This must have soured Sony's opinion of the Cell
| processor overall.
| chasil wrote:
| Sony should have realized that the Cell/Power was needed
| in great quantity, and insisted upon a second supplier.
| Motorola started making the PowerPC 601 in 1992, so a
| secondary foundry was absolutely available.
|
| From the wiki: "The introductory design is fabricated
| using a 90 nm SOI process, with initial volume production
| slated for IBM's facility in East Fishkill, New York."
|
| AMD did this for Intel up to the 286. Sony should have
| insisted upon a tidal wave of wafers, if needed.
| hawflakes wrote:
| Cell used the PowerPC isa as did the Xbox 360. Both were
| designed in the same IBM facility but separated by a
| floor. IIRC the Xbox team indirectly learned from the
| Cell team's mistakes at the process/microarch level.
|
| Cell was definitely more weird to code against and Sony
| put max theoretical perf above Xbox's approach to be more
| general purpose chip architecture. So strictly speaking
| it wasn't like most PCs at the time in the x86 sense but
| in the three mostly same cores for Xbox vs custom Cell
| and special ways to squeeze out performance.
| monocasa wrote:
| Sort of. The xenon cores are pretty damn close to cell
| PPE cores, just with VMX-128 strapped to them. They even
| share some taped out blocks, and have almost all of the
| same microarchitectural issues like the load hit store
| penalty.
| ppseafield wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification. I must have conflated "more
| general purpose" -> "more like PC".
| dfox wrote:
| IBM sold that as BladeCenter QS series. Reportendly there
| even was an prototype version that had essentially same
| hardware as PS3 including the optical drive (production
| ones are dual-CPU without GPU and optical drive).
| monocasa wrote:
| FWIW, early designs for the PS3 also were missing the GPU
| in lieu of another Cell chip. The end of Dennard scaling
| meant that they didn't hit the clock speed they
| originally intended (close to 5Ghz). It was originally
| supposed to do rasterization in software on that second
| cell, but relatively in the last minute they needed to
| strap a dedicated GPU to it. That's why Cell reads out of
| VRAM are incredibly slow, around 16MB/s.
| nlunbeck wrote:
| Iirc the PS2 also got a huge boost by being a cheap
| alternative to designated DVD players, but it eventually
| obviously paid off. I wonder how that factored into their PS3
| strategy
| epx wrote:
| I purchased my XBox One for the same reason (cost-effective
| Blu-Ray player with the possibility of playing games from
| time to time).
| ppseafield wrote:
| Indeed, although Sony hadn't created the DVD format
| (Phillips), having it did boost sales of the PS2. With the
| PS3 Sony was pushing its own format in direct competition
| to HD-DVD (also Phillips), and I'm sure losing Beta max
| market to VHS was still in their minds. So they decided to
| sell PS3 consoles at a much greater loss. It did pay off as
| well, but the first few years cost Sony a lot.
| phire wrote:
| _> (it also being primarily a vehicle for piracy certainly didn
| 't help)._
|
| The piracy hacks never used OtherOS. The first piracy hack (the
| PSJailbreak dongle exploit) simply exploited the GameOS usb
| stack and wasn't released until after OtherOS had already been
| removed in a firmware update.
|
| The only hack that ever targeted OtherOS was a complex memory
| glitching attack that was pretty hard to pull off. As far as
| I'm aware, that hack was only ever used by a few people for
| dumping memory, and those dumps were reverse engineered to find
| other exploits.
|
| If anything, OtherOS might have slowed PS3 modding efforts
| down, as modders were wasted years banging their heads against
| the reasonably secure hypervisor. Turns out, GameOS had minimal
| security, and once you gained kernel access, you could boot
| backups without needing to touch the hypervisor.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Thanks for your work reverse engineering PSJailbreak, by the
| way. (https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/PSJailbreak_Exploit_Paylo
| ad_Re...)
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I recall there was something involving Other OS and soldering
| a wire into the motherboard.
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| It was one of the first ways I could rip a bluray, though
| chasil wrote:
| I wonder how this performed compared to a DECStation 5000/240
| running Ultrix.
|
| That was my workstation for a student job. It had a MIPS R3000.
|
| DEC probably would have lasted longer if they had bought MIPS
| instead of sinking all the effort into Alpha (and PRISM before
| it).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECstation
| swatson741 wrote:
| This isn't quite correct as I understand the situation. It
| wasn't classified as a computer in Europe because it could run
| Linux but, because the bundled demo disc included Yabasic (a
| basic interpreter) in the European regions.[0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnXpzczPc38
| pengaru wrote:
| The linux kit shipped in 2002, the ps2 shipped in 2000.
|
| It came with yabasic on a demo disk, that's what qualified it
| as a computer for the eu tax break.
|
| ps2linux was chronologically irrelevant to your claim AIUI...
| Wingman4l7 wrote:
| Then Sony got sued in a class-action for removing support for
| OtherOS!
| genericuser123 wrote:
| I'm always happy to see Linux in unexpected places.
| snvzz wrote:
| Related, NetBSD had[0] a port for ps2 at some point.
|
| 0. http://www.jp.netbsd.org/ports/playstation2/
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(page generated 2024-01-29 23:01 UTC)