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Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated, but does anybody know the current status of GNU/Linux on the PS4 ?

I am looking for some little box to replace my aging home server and the PS4 looks powerful but small enough for the job.

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You can probably buy a better machine for that use case [1], unless you really want a built in Blu-ray drive or lots of memory bandwidth.

[1]: https://www.pcengines.ch/apu3a4.htm

That machine, while great (PC Engines, their best offer, Coreboot, good value for money), is designed to be a DIY router for running e.g. OPNSense.

You're probably better off with a NUC such as a Zotac or a Chinese knock off (example [1]). Why? Because given it has more horsepower and native hardware extensions for virtualization it can run VMs more efficiently.

[1] https://www.gearbest.com/mini-pc/pp_1698829.html?wid=1433363

Yes, a NUC, a miniITX PC, a commercial NAS, etc. would work. There are a lot of good options in this space.

I would note that the apu2 is more or less half of a PS4, ignoring the GPU (which probably wouldn't work that well anyway?).

    PS4              | apu2c4
    8x 1.6GHz Jaguar | 4x 1.0 GHz Jaguar
    8GB GDDR5        | 4GB DDR3-1333
    SATA, USB 3.0    | mSATA, SATA, USB 2.0/3.0, SD
    1G Ethernet      | 3x 1G Ethernet
    BT 2.1, WiFi N   | N/A
    HDMI, SPDIF      | N/A

IIRC audio over HDMI doesn't work yet (but the audio jack from the joypad works) and recently they added support for the slim and latest fat models HDMI video encoder chip.

The biggest drawback is the lack of persistence, especially if you want to use it as a server: you execute the exploit from the browser and load a Linux distribution from an external USB disk (not a real problem in itself as also the internal SATA HD is connected to the USB southbridge ^__^;)

There are some videos on YouTube that show working 3D HW acceleration tho.

I wouldn't say it's entirely unrelated, my first thought when I saw the headline was "does this mean we can run unrestricted GNU/Linux on PS4 now?" ;p

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