Linux for PlayStation 3 - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

OtherOS was a feature available in early versions of the PlayStation 3

PlayStation 3

The is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment and the successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles...

video game console

Video game console

A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or customized computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game...

that allowed other operating systems, such as Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

or FreeBSD

FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...

, to be installed on the system. This feature was made unavailable in newer models and removed from the oldest ones through a firmware

Firmware

In electronic systems and computing, firmware is a term often used to denote the fixed, usually rather small, programs and/or data structures that internally control various electronic devices...

update by Sony

Sony

, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

.

The "Other OS" feature is disabled by firmware version 3.21 but still runs on older consoles that have firmware 3.15 or lower. However, on March 30, 2010 George Hotz

George Hotz

George Francis Hotz , alias geohot, million75 or simply mil, is an American hacker known for unlocking the iPhone, allowing the phone to be used with other wireless carriers, contrary to AT&T and Apple's intent...

(aka GeoHot) stated his intention to create a custom firmware for the PS3 to counter this move, warning gamers not to update their systems until he finds a way to keep the OtherOS option on the PlayStation 3. Hotz in July 2010 left the PlayStation 3 hacking and iPhone jailbreaking scene. He made his blog (both iPhone and PS3) invite-only and deleted his Twitter account. Additionally, a class action lawsuit has been filed against Sony for those who wish to pursue legal remedies (see PlayStation 3 system software

PlayStation 3 system software

The PlayStation 3 system software is the updateable software and operating system of the PlayStation 3. The process of updating is almost identical to that of the PSP...

).

Any Linux

Linux

operating system had access to 6 of the 7 Synergistic Processing Elements; Sony implemented a hypervisor

Hypervisor

In computing, a hypervisor, also called virtual machine manager , is one of many hardware virtualization techniques that allow multiple operating systems, termed guests, to run concurrently on a host computer. It is so named because it is conceptually one level higher than a supervisory program...

restricting access from the RSX

RSX 'Reality Synthesizer'

The RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' is a proprietary graphics processing unit codeveloped by Nvidia and Sony for the PlayStation 3 game console....

. IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

provided an introduction to programming parallel

Parallel computing

Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently . There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level,...

applications on the PlayStation 3.

History

Since 2000, Sony has used the fact that the PlayStation 2

PlayStation 2

The PlayStation 2 is a sixth-generation video game console manufactured by Sony as part of the PlayStation series. Its development was announced in March 1999 and it was first released on March 4, 2000, in Japan...

can run Linux

Linux

in its marketing. They promoted the release of the PS2 Linux Kit, which included a Linux-based operating system, a USB keyboard and mouse, a VGA adapter, a PlayStation 2 Ethernet

Ethernet

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

network adapter, and a 40 GB

Gigabyte

The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is...

hard disk drive (HDD).

The PlayStation 3

PlayStation 3

does not have Linux pre-installed. However, Sony included an option in the XMB

Cross Media Bar

The XrossMediaBar is a graphical user interface developed by Sony Computer Entertainment. The interface features icons that are spread horizontally across the screen. Navigation moves the icons, instead of a cursor. These icons are used as categories to organize the options available to the user...

menu soon after the PlayStation 3

PlayStation 3

launched that allowed booting into Linux from the hard drive or from a Live CD

Live CD

A live CD, live DVD, or live disc is a CD or DVD containing a bootable computer operating system. Live CDs are unique in that they have the ability to run a complete, modern operating system on a computer lacking mutable secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive...

that the distributor's kernel

Linux kernel

The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software....

would boot. Sony stated, "It was fully intended that you, a PS3 owner, could play games, watch movies, view photos, listen to music, and run a full-featured Linux operating system that transforms your PS3 into a home computer."

When Sony announced the upcoming release of the PS3 Slim in September 2009, they stated that it would not be supporting the OtherOS feature, without offering any explanation for this. In March 2010 Sony announced that the "Other OS" capability of the original PS3 models would be removed due to security concerns in PS3 Firmware 3.21 on April 1 2010.

Several methods of bypassing the updating and retaining the ability to sign into PSN have been discovered, most of which involve using third party DNS servers.

Geohot

George Hotz

claims to have created custom firmware for the PS3 called 3.21OO that re-enables OtherOS and has published a video of his Custom Firmware as proof. Despite the release of a YouTube video which apparently demonstrates the use of his custom firmware, the length of time it has taken for a release date to be announced has convinced some in the online community that this custom firmware was in fact a hoax.

On April 27, 2010 a class action lawsuit was filed in California. The lawsuit claimed that the removal of the OtherOS feature was "unfair and deceptive" and a "breach of good faith". Most of the filing relates to violation of various consumer protection

Consumer protection

Consumer protection laws designed to ensure fair trade competition and the free flow of truthful information in the marketplace. The laws are designed to prevent businesses that engage in fraud or specified unfair practices from gaining an advantage over competitors and may provide additional...

laws relating to the removal. Several other lawsuits were also filed and are somewhat similar in nature but are filed by other individuals.

On July 14, 2010, Geohot announced that he would not bring out his custom firmware to the PlayStation 3.

In January 2011, Sony

Sony

, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

sued Geohot and members of fail0verflow for their jailbreaking of the PS3. Charges included violating the DMCA, CFAA

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a law passed by the United States Congress in 1986, intended to reduce cracking of computer systems and to address federal computer-related offenses...

, Copyright law, and California's CCDAFA

California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act

The California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act is in §502 of the California Penal Code.According to the State Administrative Manual of California, the purposes is as follows:...

, and for Breach of Contract

Breach of contract

Breach of contract is a legal cause of action in which a binding agreement or bargained-for exchange is not honored by one or more of the parties to the contract by non-performance or interference with the other party's performance....

(related to the PlayStation Network User Agreement

Terms of service are rules which one must agree to abide by in order to use a service. Unless in violation of consumer protection laws, such terms are usually legally binding...

), Tortious interference

Tortious interference

Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of tort, occurs when a person intentionally damages the plaintiff's contractual or other business relationships...

, Misappropriation

Misappropriation

In law, misappropriation is the intentional, illegal use of the property or funds of another person for one's own use or other unauthorized purpose, particularly by a public official, a trustee of a trust, an executor or administrator of a dead person's estate or by any person with a responsibility...

, and Tresspass.

On May 4th, 2011, Youness Alaoui from the PS3MFW team announced the release of a modified PS3 firmware that allows running OtherOS.

Linux kernel

Linux supported PlayStation 3

PlayStation 3

with version 2.6.21. No patches or modifications are required. A simple Linux add-on CD for the PS3 includes support for Fedora 8 and other operating systems that already claim to install natively on the PS3. However, there is currently an issue with the latest kboot boot loader provided by kernel.org

Kernel.org

Kernel.org is a main repository of source code for the Linux kernel, the base of the popular Linux operating system. It makes all versions of the source code available to all users. It also hosts various other projects, like Google Android...

. Once the user selects the default action, the USB ports are de-registered on some systems. A work-around is available at PSUbuntu.

Distributions

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

, Fedora 8, Gentoo

Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Linux is a computer operating system built on top of the Linux kernel and based on the Portage package management system. It is distributed as free and open source software. Unlike a conventional software distribution, the user compiles the source code locally according to their chosen...

, OpenSUSE

OpenSUSE

openSUSE is a general purpose operating system built on top of the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported openSUSE Project and sponsored by SUSE...

(10.3 to 11.1) , and Ubuntu

Ubuntu (operating system)

Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...

run on the PlayStation 3. Yellow Dog Linux

Yellow Dog Linux

Yellow Dog Linux, also known as YDL, is a free and open source operating system for high performance computing on multicore architectures. It focuses on GPU systems and computers using the Power Architecture . YDL is currently developed by Fixstars...

for the PlayStation 3 was first released in late 2006.

Ubuntu

Some versions of Ubuntu

Ubuntu (operating system)

Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...

up to the release 10.10 have been ported to the PS3 platform. The installer cannot run in Live mode when running in 480i

480i

480i is the shorthand name for a video mode, namely the US NTSC television system or digital television systems with the same characteristics. The i, which is sometimes uppercase, stands for interlaced, the 480 for a vertical frame resolution of 480 lines containing picture information; while NTSC...

or 480p

480p

480p is the shorthand name for a video display resolution. The p stands for progressive scan, i.e. non-interlaced. The 480 denotes a vertical resolution of 480 pixel high vertically scanning lines, usually with a horizontal resolution of 640 pixels and 4:3 aspect ratio or a horizontal resolution of...

video resolutions, but it offers a text-based installer that installs fully functional Ubuntu. It is possible to mount an external USB hard drive as the home folder during install.

The LTS release 8.04 (Hardy Heron) of Ubuntu is incompatible with the PS3. However the 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) release was ported to the PS3 on the same release date as the official main Ubuntu release.

Yellow Dog Linux

5.0 was one of the first Linux distributions to run on Sony

Sony

, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

's PlayStation 3

PlayStation 3

platform. It is designed specifically for HDTV so users with SDTV will have to use the commands 'installtext' and 'ydl480i' to install and run.

Yellow Dog Linux is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux-based operating system developed by Red Hat and targeted toward the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z, and desktop versions for x86 and x86-64...

/CentOS

CentOS

CentOS is a free operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux . It exists to provide a free enterprise class computing platform and strives to maintain 100% binary compatibility with its upstream distribution...

core and relies on the RPM

RPM Package Manager

RPM Package Manager is a package management system. The name RPM variously refers to the .rpm file format, files in this format, software packaged in such files, and the package manager itself...

package manager. Digital audio has been verified to function properly, however, the Nvidia

NVIDIA

Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...

graphics card is not supported beyond framebuffer

Framebuffer

A framebuffer is a video output device that drives a video display from a memory buffer containing a complete frame of data.The information in the memory buffer typically consists of color values for every pixel on the screen...

mode. In addition, some other hardware components will not function properly without modifications to the kernel. WiFi

WIFI

WIFI is a radio station broadcasting a brokered format. Licensed to Florence, New Jersey, USA, the station is currently operated by Florence Broadcasting Partners, LLC.This station was previously owned by Real Life Broadcasting...

functionality via the Network Manager is also not fully supported and must be entered manually via the Network Configuration tool, or in some cases, through the command shell. A workaround is available to enable wireless to be configured via the Network Manager.

OpenSUSE

openSUSE is a general purpose operating system built on top of the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported openSUSE Project and sponsored by SUSE...

10.3 was the first version of OpenSUSE to run on the Sony

Sony

, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

PlayStation 3

platform. OpenSUSE is a free version of SUSE Linux, which is owned by Novell

Novell

Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise...

. There are PlayStation 3 specific installation instructions available for OpenSUSE.

Starting with OpenSUSE 11.2, support for the PowerPC

PowerPC

PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...

(and therefore the PlayStation 3) has been dropped.

Fedora

Fedora (operating system)

Fedora is a RPM-based, general purpose collection of software, including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat...

also ran on the PlayStation 3

PlayStation 3

. Fedora 7 works on a USB external hard disk but fails to detect the internal disk, Fedora9 detects the internal disk but not the USB disk, Fedora8 will not work due to video "card" detection problems. Fedora 10 installs on the internal hard disk without any issues and works fine without having to change any settings.

Fedora 12 only installs on the PlayStation 3 when running the 64 bit kernel and only when English is the chosen language.

RSX Homebrew

Linux on the PlayStation 3 allows for a range of homebrew

Homebrew (video games)

Homebrew is a term frequently applied to video games or other software produced by consumers to target proprietary hardware platforms not typically user-programmable or that use proprietary storage methods...

programs to be developed. Although the Cell's

Cell (microprocessor)

Cell is a microprocessor architecture jointly developed by Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM, an alliance known as "STI". The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas over a four-year period beginning March 2001 on a...

performance is more than enough to handle most media requirements or render complex 3D graphics, it does lack the teraflops

FLOPS

In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...

performance of a contemporary GPU

Graphics processing unit

A graphics processing unit or GPU is a specialized circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory in such a way so as to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display...

's texture fetching hardware. For this reason many complex games aren't possible on the PlayStation 3 through Linux, as access to hardware acceleration in the RSX

RSX 'Reality Synthesizer'

The RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' is a proprietary graphics processing unit codeveloped by Nvidia and Sony for the PlayStation 3 game console....

is restricted by a hypervisor

Hypervisor

.

There have been developments in enabling access to the RSX through the Linux kernel

Linux kernel

The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software....

and the X Window System

X Window System

The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

. It's possible to use the RSX memory as swap space. A trick to access some 3D functions was blocked with firmware 2.10.

AsbestOS

Reverse engineering advancements focused around a recently discovered USB descriptor parsing vulnerability in 3.41 firmware, which allowed running the Linux kernel on 3.41 firmware. The current state of the project is the ability to load the Linux kernel via TFTP and run it with access to all 7 SPE's (requires applying a small patch to the kernel). The rest of the system can run off an NFS share - hard disk access is currently not implemented, as well as some other features.

Also, since the exploit runs the kernel with game privileges, graphics acceleration is now available, although it requires reworking of the nouveau

Nouveau (graphics)

In computing, nouveau is a software project aiming to develop free software drivers for Nvidia graphics cards, by reverse engineering Nvidia's current proprietary drivers for Linux. This project by X.Org Foundation and freedesktop.org was initially based on the obfuscated 2D-only free and...

driver code.

FreeBSD

Support for PlayStation 3 was added to FreeBSD

FreeBSD

9.0 in summer 2010. This support is limited only to network-booting the machine on machines with firmware version 3.15 and OtherOS functionality still intact.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.