4 ms·

The bit I found interesting was how Xbox's hypervisor is based on that of Azure, rather than anything they did on the desktop, and that Xbox games are/were pack

The bit I found interesting was how Xbox's hypervisor is based on that of Azure, rather than anything they did on the desktop, and that Xbox games are/were packaged up with an OS rather than relying on a single OS on the device, so a bit more like containers. Dave also said he's working on making ML workloads run on idle Xbox Cloud Gaming devices. Any architectural tie between Azure and Xbox had never occurred to me before.

muststopmyths 3y ago
Packaging a game with the entire OS was very common in all consoles, since the game was supposed to be the only thing running, and in real time .
- dijit 3y ago
  sort of, if you go back into the NES and Gameboy days, sure, but PS2/Xbox had an operating system that it loaded and so did PS3/Xbox 360. Microsoft took a step "backwards" in allowing it to load any variant of the SDK that you built the game with. In contrast, you had to keep rebuilding your PS4 games when they came out with new major SDK versions, so the development experience was definitely better on the xbox one. (oh, and you could turn a test kit into a retail kit was great too, as someone who worked closer to live operations than dev only).
- mhh__ 3y ago
  The Wii UI is partly a library (shared library even?) iirc
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Unikernel, baby! (Everything old really is new again, and I love it)
- TMWNN 3y ago
  Many PC games through the mid-1980s were shipped as booters, for ease of use and for copy protection. The growing popularity of hard drives caused the shift to key disks, code wheels/books, and other forms of copy protection. Same for many Apple II games. Although C64 does not have disk autoboot, one can argue that the same principle exists there too, again because of copy protection; many Commodore disk games use custom disk formats that Commodore DOS cannot read. `LOAD "*",8,1` loads a boostrap that in turn reprograms the drive to load the format for the rest of the game.
helloooooooo 3y ago
The hypervisor in Azure, Xbox and Windows are all the same: HyperV.
- spaintech 3y ago
  Hey Torrent, can you provide a reliable source for that info? Recently, I’ve noticed a surge in Domain Specific VMs even in userland for Linux (like Google Falcon). This has led me to wonder if a boot loader combined with a bytecode VM could optimize performance in not only games but also various applications. I tried checking an Xbox game binary for traces of a VM. Given the potential for encryption obfuscation, I assumed the binaries might be encrypted and didn’t dig deeper. I’m not familiar with the gaming or pirating scenes, so this is all novel to me. But I’m keen on exploring this idea further. What can HyperV bring to the table in this context?
- Sylamore 3y ago
  Dave explicitly said in the video that the Xbox hypervisor is based on Red Dog, which is not HyperV based, which was also the hypervisor used in early iterations of Azure, but that currently Azure runs on a variant of HyperV.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    And Azure Host OS, which is Windows based. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-blog/azure-host-os-cloud-host/ba-p/3709528 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-b...
dist-epoch 3y ago
There is an amazing video about Xbox security. It's extreme. For example the games executables are actually encrypted on the game discs, and it's almost impossible to even dump the actual binary that is running. RAM is also encrypted. Or the reason modern TPMs live inside the CPU is to prevent sniffing the TPM bus which people did on the Xbox.
- azalemeth 3y ago
  The part about that video that makes me resolve to never buy an XBox is when they explicitly state that the user is considered hostile and the threat vector – hence the silicon-level DRM that requires a clean room, electron microscope, and molecular beam epitaxy to reverse (which their crypto algorithms also assume will happen, what with the whole pubkey/privkey root of trust and all...). I'd like to be treated as a customer, and allowed to play on the hardware I just paid a lot of money to buy!
  - ErneX 3y ago
    I prefer that so we don’t get cheaters in online games for example. Consoles are cheap too, so not a lot a money.

muststopmyths 3y ago

Packaging a game with the entire OS was very common in all consoles, since the game was supposed to be the only thing running, and in real time .

dijit 3y ago
sort of, if you go back into the NES and Gameboy days, sure, but PS2/Xbox had an operating system that it loaded and so did PS3/Xbox 360. Microsoft took a step "backwards" in allowing it to load any variant of the SDK that you built the game with. In contrast, you had to keep rebuilding your PS4 games when they came out with new major SDK versions, so the development experience was definitely better on the xbox one. (oh, and you could turn a test kit into a retail kit was great too, as someone who worked closer to live operations than dev only).
mhh__ 3y ago
The Wii UI is partly a library (shared library even?) iirc
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Unikernel, baby! (Everything old really is new again, and I love it)
TMWNN 3y ago
Many PC games through the mid-1980s were shipped as booters, for ease of use and for copy protection. The growing popularity of hard drives caused the shift to key disks, code wheels/books, and other forms of copy protection. Same for many Apple II games. Although C64 does not have disk autoboot, one can argue that the same principle exists there too, again because of copy protection; many Commodore disk games use custom disk formats that Commodore DOS cannot read. `LOAD "*",8,1` loads a boostrap that in turn reprograms the drive to load the format for the rest of the game.

helloooooooo 3y ago

The hypervisor in Azure, Xbox and Windows are all the same: HyperV.

spaintech 3y ago
Hey Torrent, can you provide a reliable source for that info? Recently, I’ve noticed a surge in Domain Specific VMs even in userland for Linux (like Google Falcon). This has led me to wonder if a boot loader combined with a bytecode VM could optimize performance in not only games but also various applications. I tried checking an Xbox game binary for traces of a VM. Given the potential for encryption obfuscation, I assumed the binaries might be encrypted and didn’t dig deeper. I’m not familiar with the gaming or pirating scenes, so this is all novel to me. But I’m keen on exploring this idea further. What can HyperV bring to the table in this context?
Sylamore 3y ago
Dave explicitly said in the video that the Xbox hypervisor is based on Red Dog, which is not HyperV based, which was also the hypervisor used in early iterations of Azure, but that currently Azure runs on a variant of HyperV.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  And Azure Host OS, which is Windows based. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-blog/azure-host-os-cloud-host/ba-p/3709528 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-b...

dist-epoch 3y ago

There is an amazing video about Xbox security. It's extreme. For example the games executables are actually encrypted on the game discs, and it's almost impossible to even dump the actual binary that is running. RAM is also encrypted. Or the reason modern TPMs live inside the CPU is to prevent sniffing the TPM bus which people did on the Xbox.

azalemeth 3y ago
The part about that video that makes me resolve to never buy an XBox is when they explicitly state that the user is considered hostile and the threat vector – hence the silicon-level DRM that requires a clean room, electron microscope, and molecular beam epitaxy to reverse (which their crypto algorithms also assume will happen, what with the whole pubkey/privkey root of trust and all...). I'd like to be treated as a customer, and allowed to play on the hardware I just paid a lot of money to buy!
- ErneX 3y ago
  I prefer that so we don’t get cheaters in online games for example. Consoles are cheap too, so not a lot a money.