Say good-bye to Linux on the PS3 | Hacker News Reader

Say good-bye to Linux on the PS3

news.cnet.com

28 pointspavel27 comments

The really galling thing is how they spin this as a feature, using the most convoluted corporate doublespeak I've seen in a while. The phrase "Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining" comes to mind.

I thought the "Linux on PS3" was just a scam Sony pursued to avoid a video game tax treatment in the EU. If I remember right they got sued about that (that the EU wanted to tax the PS3 as a video game) but I forget what came of that.

That was Yabasic on the PS2. And they didn't get away with it.

One of my roommates constantly uses Linux on the PS3 as his justification for why the PS3 is better than the Xbox (oddly he just says this, and hasn't actually loaded Linux on it from what I can tell).

Sony seems to be notorious for what they allow as features on their system. SACD optical out playing, PS2 support and Linux support seem to flip back and forth between hardware and software versions.

that's because, there no real difference (experience wise) and in the end it's decided on stupid things like this. There isn't much competition in the console space so they all pretty much do the same thing.

The only real advantage sony has is the nice bluray player but with the price of bluray players right now, it's a very moot point now.

I like the talk about the (now defunct :() Linux feature just cause it lets me call my xbox owning friends Microsoft groupies ;p

Sony is just buying time. Sooner or later someone is going to hack the PS3 and users will be able to install whatever they want.

One of the Wii hackers who gave a presentation at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin said that the only reason the PS3 hadn't been completely hacked yet is that you could already do most of what the hackers and homebrewers wanted, without modchips or removing the hypervisor. http://www.flickr.com/photos/55502932@N00/4314288066/sizes/o... Now that you can't boot other OS's, the PS3 hacks are only going to get more intense.

Interesting. My assumption was mostly that piracy motivated the hacks, and running "homebrew" was a minor aside. This was mostly the case with the PSP custom firmware scene, at the very least.

Homebrewers and pirates are surprisingly distinct groups. A couple small examples: http://www.wiibrew.org/wiki/Team_Twiizers#Philosophy and http://www.wiibrew.org/wiki/WarezInstaller/information

Well this is just absurd. I bought my PS3 in a large part to support this open(ish) hardware notion amongst console makers. What a lot of good that did.

Unfortunately, 'Sony' and 'open' are rarely related...

I tried YDL, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE on my PS3, and with the relatively small amount of memory, the slow disk, and the locked-down graphics subsystem I found that I couldn't really do many useful things with it. If I were involved in HPC I'm sure I could have found something, but as-is OtherOS has always been more of a gimmick than a tool in my eyes.

I imagine those interested in using their PS3s for scientific computing or Linux hacking won't mind not updating the firmware, while those interested primarily in gaming or media playing won't care that they can't dual-boot anymore. It's frustrating that Sony are doing this, but I don't think that practically speaking this changes a whole lot.

So... What will you do? Buy an Xbox 360? ;-)

It's not like you have a whole lot of choice...

And yes, it sucks.

I would like an inexpensive non-x86 desktop. A Cell-based box would be interesting, as would be a SPARC or a many-core ARM thingie. I find this x86-only world boring.

Nah, ill just buy a media center pc and put boxee or something on it. I don't play a lot of games, in fact, one of the motivators for buying the PS3 was to see if I would be interested in more gaming on newer systems. Turns out I'm still not much of a gamer.

I wonder if/when someone will hack the Boxee Box into a full computer; it's got decent specs and the right ports.

This appears to be in response to the announcements of PS3 hypervisor exploits that rely on the use of OtherOS (specifically, Linux), since in the past Sony has insisted that they had no plans to ever deprecate Linux support, let alone force it in this manner:

http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-dev/2009-August/00...

Allowing people to opt out of the firmware update isn't as nice as it sounds, since you can't have a damaged PS3 serviced without getting it updated to the latest firmware. A few PS3 devs I follow on twitter have already discussed buying extra 'fat' PS3s to use as replacements in case their current ones die.

Kind of a short-sighted decision, since a lot of people who do development on PS3 software use this feature - getting a real devkit for use at home isn't particularly easy, and PS3 linux lets you do a lot of Cell hacking on inexpensive hardware.

What does one have to do to get a dev kit actually?

Pitch your game concept to Sony; if they approve it then you'll be allowed to buy a ~$10K devkit. (Or if you're a wildly successful indie game developer, they'll give you a devkit for free.)

Or you can use a modchip (not so easy with the PS3 though). At the last studio I worked at, rather than purchasing new dev kits, I/we figured that using modded PS2's for the QA team was a lot more cost effective. My contact at SONY did not think it was such a bad idea either :)

Is each Devkit ~10K, or is that for a site license? It seems that QA costs would be astronomical if they were 10K per system.

That's for each one. Apparently I'm a little behind the times, because they dropped to $2K recently: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/24/sony-introduces-a-new-ps3... IIRC they were originally ~20K and the military-industrial complex kept trying to buy them but Sony refused because they didn't even have enough for the real game developers.

I've read that many console games are developed simultaneously on PC and console so that the developers who don't have a devkit can run the game.

> PS3 linux lets you do a lot of Cell hacking on inexpensive hardware.

This benefits mostly IBM, who sells Cell-based blade servers. Sony sells PS3 consoles at a loss. Any use that does not include buying a couple games means a bad quarterly report.

Are they still selling them at a loss?

That's how it starts out, before serious cost reduction.

Also, hasn't IBM capped the Cell line?

Yes, still at a loss from the what I last read over at gamasutra and game developer. SONY anticipated turning a profit with the release of the PS3 slim but that apparently did not pan out.

The Slim has no Linux capability and allowing Linux on older PS3's holds no benefit for Sony. It made a little sense in the beginning, teaching some Cell skills to developers who could get interested into developing for the machine, but none now (or they would allow it on the slim). What makes sense is the idea Sony fears exploits coming from the Linux side could compromise the signing keys and allow bootleg/homebrew software to run on the consoles.

> Also, hasn't IBM capped the Cell line?

Nope. At least two blades on the lineup. Don't know for how long - GPUs should pack more punch per watt and per dollar.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/i...

Thank you!

Further research indicated that IBM canceled one Cell processor but by no means all of them; I assume what I read back in November confounded the two.

The Cell, as a HPC core, makes little sense. You can get more mileage out of a generic GPU these days, it seems. And with the coming arrival of x86s with on-chip GPUs, I guess it will be very hard to sell a Cell blade at those costs. It simply doesn't have the horsepower.

Sony may end-up being the only customer using it. And that may bring an early arrival to the PS4.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com