PlayStation 4 Running Linux Can Use Open-Source Radeon Gallium3D Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PlayStation 4 Running Linux Can Use Open-Source Radeon Gallium3D Driver

Released a few days back was a modified Linux kernel that can run on the PlayStation 4. With a Sony PlayStation 4 hack by "fail0verflow", it's possible to run a Linux desktop on this latest-generation game console. Now these device hackers have managed to get the PlayStation 4 working with the Radeon Gallium3D driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-G3D-PS4

[Nille]

AMDs statement to this Change in the Upstream Stack? i mean this is not a SoC that Supposed to used by Upstream software. bridgman? twriter?

[Niarbeht]

Is it wrong that I _REALLY_ want to see them run Phoronix Test Suite on there, and install Steam and give us some idea how things perform?

I know Linux gaming performance won't be great because of the low single-core speed of the CPU, but I still think it'd be interesting to see.

[bibaheu]

Marcan, the main developer behind fail0verflow, posted some comments in Reddit.

I asked him if he tried anything more complex than glxgears:

Yes, I've tried some pretty heavy stuff and it works fine. I don't want to spoil what we did try :-). We mostly seem to hit CPU performance bottlenecks right now. Until a few hours ago, CPUs were stuck at 800MHz - I just hacked them up to P0 state for now but we don't have the regular ACPI P-state driver working yet to automatically manage it. Even at full speed though, the individual cores are not that fast so it's easy to be CPU-bound on single-thread workloads.

[FireBurn]

How long before someone puts SteamOS on there? I imagine Sony won't be happy that one of the cheapest Steam machines will be using their hardware and they won't see any of the money (the console itself is a loss maker)

[utack]

the console itself is a loss maker

Any source it really is?
The APU is a big wild card, but the rest of the system is not that impressive.

[darkbasic]

the console itself is a loss maker

I really don't believe it.

[FireBurn]

From when the console was new http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/playstat...xpects-profit/

[chithanh]

I remember Sony saying they initially sold the console at a minimal loss (it was already profitable after accounting for the typical items in the inital purchase).
I'm pretty sure that falling costs made them reach profitability on the hardware pretty soon. Given that they kept the price stable for 2 years, they almost surely made a big profit.

One interesting thing is that the PS4 APU seems to be essentially a bigger Kabini (2nd gen GCN). This could mean FreeSync over HDMI support in the future.

[chithanh]

AMDs statement to this Change in the Upstream Stack?
bridgman?

I'm pretty sure that AMD folks will talk to their legal department before making any statements here.
Anything that could be seen as aiding the console hackers would potentially cause huge problems for the company.

I expect that the commit will be merged by someone not working for AMD, if at all. Maybe AMD will even insist on a separate driver, like for Intel did for the reverse engineered PowerVR driver.