4 ms·
Modern game consoles run with an OS that acts much more like a hypervisor than an actual operating system. There is a very distinct possibility that valve has c
by Arelius 15y ago
Modern game consoles run with an OS that acts much more like a hypervisor than an actual operating system. There is a very distinct possibility that valve has choosen to develop the system components required to manage the running game, and the requisite steam services, without actually needing to take an existing off-the-shelf kernel +- any userland. Combine that with the fact that there are tons of other existing kernels which could fit the bill, BSD, l4, even darwin is out there.
And frankly Microsoft could be licensing them some sort of Windows variant OS. Afaik, they maintain a positive relationship with Microsoft, and other than the conflict of interest with consoles, Microsoft knows that Valve is a very powerful player in the market. Also, do recall that Microsoft has licensed out their OS before, it as a different world at the time, but the Dreamcast was using a Microsoft derived kernel.
- bryanlarsen 15y agoI doubt that there is much benefit in using a "hypervisor" than just using Linux. On the PS3 with its 256MB of RAM and its 20GB hard drive, ~10 megabytes of RAM for kernel + core libraries and ~5 gigabytes of hard drive is a lot just for the operating system. On a modern machine that's just noise. As for CPU usage, a properly tuned Linux kernel with unneeded services turned off shouldn't be significantly different from a hypervisor once it's booted. Valve may try and set things up so that X11 is optional but even that should get mostly out of the way if you use the right libraries. (DRI etc.)
- Arelius 15y agoBut there is benefit in not using Linux. Most notably from a business standpoint (GPL). And benefits from not using most of the existing infrastructure (I highly suspect that X11 would be wholly excluded,mrather than just optional.) I'm not trying to suggest that they will use a hypervisor, but rather suggest that they have a ton more options then seem to be listed here.