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I ported Linux to the PS5 and turned it into a Steam Machine
- gchamonlive 8mo agoIt's very interesting but I can't seem to find anymore tech details other than you need an older firmware, because you need to run a full chain exploit (https://www.notebookcheck.net/A-modder-has-successfully-ported-Linux-to-the-PS5-running-GTA-5-Enhanced-with-ray-tracing.1244367.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/A-modder-has-successfully-port...) Also, can you do this and still be able to access the original OS? It be nice to run Linux on it, but I'd also need to access my PS5 library, so do I need two machines for this?
- IronBacon 8mo agoI don't know if it's related, but a few days ago I've read about an update about the mast1c0re exploit that permits to run native code (userland) on latest PS5 FW without a kernel exploit: https://xcancel.com/CTurtE/status/2029321988397727776 https://xcancel.com/CTurtE/status/2029321988397727776
- IronBacon 8mo agoAccording to some hearsay, there is allegedly at least another one unpatched hypervisor exploit in recent firmware. Considering the OP's track record, I'm not surprised he's sitting on a full-chain jailbreak. Porting the Linux kernel to the PS5 is also an impressive flex, quite funny thinking that ten years ago, in 2016, fail0verflow did the same for the PS4...
- love2read 8mo agoIt's sad to me how exciting it is to run <your own software> on <your own hardware>
- basilgohar 8mo agoThis has always been the hacker spirit. Make things designed to do one thing do another thing. If it's against the hardware maker's intentions or just completely outside their expectation, even better!
- tw04 8mo agoI don't think he's making a comment on the hacker spirit. He's making a comment on the fact that it has somehow become not just commmon, but accepted that a vendor can tell us and force us to use something in the way they want. Imagine, for instance, if you bought a flat head screwdriver, but the manufacturer told you that you could never, ever, under any circumstances use it to pry something open. It was stricly to be used for installing or removing screws. We would all laugh that vendor out of the room and tell them they're insane. Somehow we stopped doing that with all sorts of newer technologies.
- irishcoffee 8mo agoClearly, no “we” did not, as evidenced by running Linux on a ps5.
- tw04 8mo agoSo society laughed at Sony for restricting the OS on the PS5 and refused to buy it? Because I'm pretty sure one person going through a ridiculous effort to install linux isn't reflective of society rejecting the restriction. 92.2M units sold, as of today 1 unit? running Linux.
- irishcoffee 8mo ago“Society rejecting the restriction” huh? Someone proved you wrong, you need more than one person to do it now? Goal posts, moved. Not everything needs to have political, teenage angst applied to it.
- tw04 8mo ago
- pkilgore 8mo agoIt's sad to see someone running doom on a pregnancy tester?
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agoNo, people might be misreading his comment. (To me) it seems that, he is saying how bad the situation of hardware/lock-in is that we are being excited over being able to run our own software on said hardware in the first place (Aka the reason why we are here) Being able to run doom on pregnancy tester is actually good. If I paid for the tester, I am gonna use the whole tester to run doom (LOL) So I think this is what they meant.
- threetonesun 8mo agoOr to put it more concretely in this context: Sony used to let you run Linux on PlayStations! There were all kinds of interesting uses for PS3s outside of gaming that they (initially) supported.
- LeFantome 8mo agoI do not own any Sony products and I am not a corporate cheerleader. But “we” have to own that the reason that Sony stopped selling/supporting Linux in their machines is because “we” used it to circumvent copyright on closed-source games. It is the problem with “our” ethics, not theirs that led to Linux getting pulled.
- mschuster91 8mo agoThat's BS. Linux/OtherOS on the PS3 only existed so that Sony could evade European tariffs on pure gaming consoles that were markedly higher than on general-purpose computers. Once the tariffs went, so went OtherOS support. In any case OtherOS didn't have access to the full system resources and, on top of that, Sony actually lost money on PS3s because it was priced as a loss-leader, with game purchases being supposed to earn the actual money.
- 8mo ago
- jsemrau 8mo agoWe need to bring back this culture.
- LeFantome 8mo agoDid it go somewhere?
- dylan604 8mo agoRight? They're asking that question on a forum dedicated to the subject that has been around for nearly two decades. The entirety of Silicon Valley was born in people's garages. Not really sure where it's meant to come back from
- rvz 8mo agoThe problem is that the 'developers' you are seeing today are not the same from the 90s that have that hacker mindset and curiosity. Instead, it has been hijacked by those who have never opened a PC before or were never interested in the field to begin with and saw it as a VC vehicle get-rich-quick scheme infiltrated by tons of grifters. Once the money dries up post-extraction then they (grifters) abandon the field to the true 'hackers' still in the field doing clever projects like this one.
- dylan604 8mo agoTo me, the difference is that "hackers" has become focused on software. The early days in SV they had to invent the hardware. Now, hardware is commodity, and it has a novel idea for a hardware hacker to make the news. The Zuck hacked his first iterations of what became Facebook together. Apps like Snapchat and what not are just software hacked together using the hardware in novel ways. Things like Flipper0 are interesting hardware from hackers. Some interesting things find their way to the crowd funding sites that ultimately die on the vine. Sites for 3D printing show there are still some mechanical hardware types that still tinker. Overall, it just shows that the hacker ethos never went any where. It's just younger people being exposed and thinking it's something new.
- charcircuit 8mo agoMost computers in the world don't need the ability to have their operating system changed or run custom user built software. Consumers will be fine with the preexisting software and such a feature is unneeded complexity that almost no one will use.
- realusername 8mo agoIf consumers are fine with the pre-existing software and will never try to use anything else, why do we lock them out though? Something doesn't add up.
- charcircuit 8mo ago>why do we lock them out though? It reduces security, expands attack surface, reputational damage from people complaining about their phones bricking doing something unsupported.
- tavavex 8mo agoThat's how all these vendors justify their actions once they decide it's time to kill off their competition and impose arbitrary limitations. But how real is this "damage", actually? How big do you think the overlap between 'users who want to install custom operating systems', 'users who have no idea what they're doing' and 'users who would loudly complain after an obvious mistake on their own part' is? The #1 source of reputational damage for vendors is people breaking something within their controlled environments. The bar to run a custom OS is already so high for average people that it will never matter or be a social engineering attack vector, just because of how niche it is. We've been able to run anything on PCs for over 40 years, custom firmware for phones goes back at least 25 years, and despite all of this, the world hasn't gone up in flames yet. The security pressure exists, but it's minimal compared to everything else. The real reasons are profit-driven.
- charcircuit 8mo ago>The bar to run a custom OS is already so high for average people that it will never matter or be a social engineering attack vector >We've been able to run anything on PCs for over 40 years And the PC platform has had terrible security. Do not use it as an example of everything being fine. You are forgetting the malware for PCs which would spread by writing a custom operating system on a removal media. Then that removable media is plugged into another PC and when that PC boots up it boots that operating system which goes ahead and infects the OS installed to the hard disk along with any other removable media.
- LeFantome 8mo agoI get what you are saying. But this always would have been exciting. This is like a post saying someone got Apple Basic running on their Commodore 64.
- SecretDreams 8mo agoAgree with both you and OP. Hardware we buy should be open to be modified easily with a common open source scheme - but any modifications should void warranty. At the same time, we don't live in that world and so this post and the work done is still cool and exciting.
- andai 8mo agoMore like if Commodore used to sell an official Apple Basic package and then stopped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2
- buran77 8mo agoPlayStation 3 similarly had the option to run alternative operating systems, virtualized [1]. I remember running Yellow Dog Linux on a couple of PS3s. (edit. just found the YDL 5.0, 6.0, and 6.2 buried somewhere on my NAS). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
- dmoy 8mo agoAnd sadly it's only going to get harder and harder. More stuff is going to get locked down - not just PCs and PC-adjacent stuff like PS/XBox/etc. It's already somewhat involved to get new firmware on a lot of network connected home devices you buy, but it'll become even more difficult. 3D printers are about to get pushed over the edge via legislation. Tractors.... gestures wildly at Deere You can't fix software problems in your dishwasher or fridge. Liability lawsuits drive a lot of this :/
- wolrah 8mo ago> Liability lawsuits drive a lot of this :/ That's the official line a lot of the vendors responsible will push, but the evidence for that is...lacking. Compare that to the simple reality that doing this is more profitable and devices that can't be easily repaired lead to more consistent sales. Capitalism gonna capitalism.
- dmoy 8mo agoYea I don't doubt that capitalist greed goes into it too. And in the case of true fear of liability lawsuits, even that also has capitalist greed undertones: Imagine you're building random-iot-device-with-a-lithium-battery. You could: 1. Build the whole thing so it's easily hackable Your lawyers point out prior art in liability cases around exploding/burning lithium-powered-devices and won't really approve release without some precautionary measures 2. Properly isolate and test the battery and related systems, ensure they can't possibly overheat even in the face of arbitrary input from the rest of the system, if modified. Lock down the battery parts, leave everything else open. 3. Do some testing on the whole-ass system to assuage your lawyers, and then lock the whole thing down 3 is typically cheaper, a lot of companies then open door 3 instead of 2. Capitalism and liability lawsuits tag teaming here imo Side note, the reason we have a litigious society imo is because most companies reach for door #4 4. Yolo, release unsafe product even with company's own firmware, fires and explosions ensue, people are maimed and die, lawsuits follow. Because lawsuits are the only recourse, we don't hold the companies criminally liable or anything.
- 8mo ago
- RobRivera 8mo agoWhy sad?
- stavros 8mo agoBecause it should be a given and super boring.
- sejje 8mo agoParticularly when we were already doing this in the late 90s with the original Xbox. I ran debian on mine. I would have thought we'd have soft-mods to allow this within a couple weeks of any new console launch, and perhaps the hardware vendors would even be supporting it by now.
- stavros 8mo agoYeah, but alas, since they sell the hardware at a loss, they really don't want you using it for anything that's not "buy games from us". I was really looking forward to the Steam Machine but the RAM shortage ruined their plans.
- jama211 8mo agoIt’s pretty rare that you actively cant, but it makes sense a lot of businesses wouldn’t bother to try and assist you with doing that. But some definitely don’t want you to, and I get that that’s sad. Always makes space for a competitor though!
- 6SixTy 8mo agoIt's unfortunately par for the course for something like a console to be like this. Consoles are often subsidized by licensing and publishing costs of games, so preventing you from running your own software is within their best interest.
- nickysielicki 8mo agoI mean, the hardware is sold at a loss so it makes perfect sense.
- whycome 8mo agoI absolutely hate the design of the "app store" which means that you can't revert to an older version when you find out the new one changes a critical feature that you used previously.
- tym0 8mo agoWonder if the work being done on the BC-250 helped.
- jhoho 8mo agoI would guess so, as the BC-250 is basically a PS5 with 24 instead of 36 CUs. For the curious: https://github.com/mothenjoyer69/bc250-documentation https://github.com/mothenjoyer69/bc250-documentation I would guess that he could leverage the APU support that was merged with Mesa 25.1.
- imglorp 8mo agoI wonder how the gpu interface was discovered and ported.
- embedding-shape 8mo agoNot a direct answer, but this seems to be the PR for adding PS5 support to Mesa: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/40274 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/40..., seems it's just oneline change of AMDGPU_GFX1013_RANGE, not sure if it's a UI bug or what.
- Aurornis 8mo agoIt has an AMD RDNA2 GPU. It might have some small specializations but it’s going to be 99% the same as other RDNA2 GPUs.
- ThatPlayer 8mo agoAccording to the open source drivers, it's closer to RDNA1+RT. Missing features of RDNA2 like mesh shaders. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11982 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11982
- 360MustangScope 8mo agoLook up the BC-250, it is the PS5 but was created for mining. You can get these very cheap on eBay.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- wombat-man 8mo agoI kinda need a little media server, would love to run it on a ps5
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agoLinux on PS5 seems absolutely amazing. Anybody running any AI models using the GPU of PS5 or using the ram (16GB). PS5 is probably sold at a loss/bare minimum profit to turn profit during the gaming product itself, not the hardware as compared to the steam machine So running Linux on PS5 is so freaking cool. Gonna have to share this article with my brother who owns one. This reminds me of that time when US govt. bought over 1700* (see derektank's comment) PS3 or similar and hooked them up all together to make a supercomputer because this way it costed them less than having a computer themselves and Today's ram prices being 5 times higher in such short term is yea. PS5 hacking community feels really cool!
- derektank 8mo agoThe Air Force Research Lab’s “Condor Cluster” was actually composed of over 1700 PS3 https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/114782/playstation-3-supercomputer-can-read-correct-input/ https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/114782/plays...
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agoThanks, I have updated the comment. I had thought that it was 200 but its actually 1700 and also for the official link. From the link that you shared: It's currently the seventh-greenest computer in the world, he said. "This particular system is about half a petaflop, or capable of about 500 trillion calculations per second," he said. "In the current time that we can measure it, it's about the 35th- or 36th-fastest computer in the world, and with some things that are going to be changing in the next eight or nine months with some upgrades, we could boost it to maybe the 20th-fastest computer in the world, and at the same time make it, at that moment in time, the greenest computer." Do you feel like something like this can again be possible with Linux being ported to PS5 now? I don't quite understand why sony would remove the linux feature from ps4 if this was something that the govt. was benefitting from. I assume that the govt. must have put some pressure to still allow linux on ps4/ps5 given that it was benefitting from it in the past?
- 8mo ago
- coolcoder9520 8mo agoImpressive work, especially getting the GPU drivers stable enough for Steam. The PS5's custom I/O complex (that hardware decompression unit) must have been a headache to work around — did you end up bypassing it entirely or did you manage to get any of that throughput exposed to Linux? I'm curious about thermal behavior under sustained load. The PS5's cooling is tuned tightly to the stock firmware's power envelope; running arbitrary Linux workloads probably hits different thermal profiles. Did you see throttling during long gaming sessions, or is the headroom sufficient when you're not pushing the RSX equivalent?
- Aurornis 8mo agoLinux and GPU drivers had already been ported to the BC-250, which was a binned down variant of the PS5 processor. The driver change to support the actual PS5 was a 1-line fix to make it recognize the slightly different GPU ID on the PS5
- MrDrMcCoy 8mo agoThat doesn't really answer these questions.
- Aurornis 8mo agoAs far as I can tell the Twitter poster hasn’t answered any of the hard questions either. Just the screenshots and some comments, but I also don’t have time to go through the hundreds of comments in that thread. He did post the 1-line patch for Mesa to add GPU support like I said above: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/40274 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/40...
- 6SixTy 8mo agoBC-250 had a standard set of SuperIO and Southbridge, and the PS5 has a duo consisting of a custom NVMe controller and custom SuperIO. If what is true from the PS4 is applicable to the PS5, there had to have been some patches to the kernel in order to add platform support for those custom chips.
- throwawayk7h 8mo agoThere are a lot of ps5 hardware features like shared memory between cpu and gpu which I'm not sure games could take advantage of without being specially coded for it.
- Rohansi 8mo agoShared memory between CPU and GPU isn't exclusive to consoles. All (?) integrated GPUs do it. Mobile devices, PCs, Apple Silicon, it's all the same. The only big difference is consoles have the CPU using GDDR memory (what dedicated GPUs use) instead of typical DDR. You're not going to need to code anything differently for that but it will have different performance characteristics.
- monsieurbanana 8mo agoI think you very much want to code differently if you were to target gddr instead of ddr. Unless you were only working at a high-level of course, but it would significantly influence eg the rendering engine
- vzaliva 8mo agoIs it something wihch would make PS5 attractive to run local LLM models? I've heard Mac Mini shared CPU/GPU memory makes it popular for that.
- bigyabai 8mo agoNo, unified memory is not a panacea. The PS5 GPU is mostly raster-focused and doesn't have good acceleration options outside Vulkan compute. Your best ~$300-400 option for inference is still the RTX 3060 AFAIK.
- pantalaimon 8mo agoThe Mac studio also comes with up to 512GiB RAM. The PS5 only has 8GiB.
- 8mo ago
- RonanSoleste 8mo agoNow i want an PS5. This makes the thing useful to me
- gbraad 8mo agoWe need to liberate the Xbox too, or at least run steam link on them.
- diabllicseagull 8mo agospeaking of xbox, we witnessed a ps5 being used like a pc before xbox console-pc hybrid could materialize.
- gbraad 8mo agoThat is my point. I thought the Xbox would bring computing to the living room. Steam and now PS5 can, leaving slop in the dust
- kotaKat 8mo agoMost people accepted the development sandbox Microsoft graciously allowed and turned it into a fairly thriving 'homebrew' scene: see the https://xbdev.store/ https://xbdev.store/ It's just a shame Sony gatekeeps running any kind of personal code on the platform and that access to development tools is a total nightmare.
- gbraad 8mo agoRight, but I expected the sandbox would have a MSTSC (Remote desktop client). Or a decent browser to allow use as a more serious machine
- LollipopYakuza 8mo agoYou may want to have a look to Moonlight, that's more performant than Steam link. I haven't tried it on Xbox but used it on a Steam deck and between PCs. It worked flawlessly on a not-so-good WiFi.
- gbraad 8mo agoI have used moonlight, but got some of those older SteamLink and they work well. though, moonlight on Xbox?
- yunnpp 8mo agoRelevant jailbreak doc: https://thecybersecguru.com/news/ps5-rom-keys-leaked/ https://thecybersecguru.com/news/ps5-rom-keys-leaked/ tl;dr Get a copy of Star Wars: Racer Revenge (ps4) before it goes over $200.
- BoorishBears 8mo agoThat article is from January 4th, so a bit too late for that
- asimovDev 8mo agoNot surprised to see the author's twitter username. Theflow is an amazing hacker and been in the console homebrew scene for over a decade at this point. Incredible skill and talent.
- irenetusuq 8mo ago[dead]