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.

Their PS4 Linux kernel needed over 4,000 lines of changes to get it working on the PlayStation 4 console, but they announced success a few days back during CCC's 32C3.

Coming out yesterday is working support for 3D acceleration atop the Gallium3D driver. The group has patched the libdrm, Mesa 11.1, and xf86-video-ati DDX user-space components to work with the PlayStation 4's AMD APU.

These patches are quite small and just add the 0x9920 PCI ID to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, identify it as AMD "Liverpool", and a few other trivial tweaks. The patches for the user-space RadeonSI components can be found via this Git repository though the developers do plan to mainline the support when it has stabilized. The repository notes, "These are some trivial patches to libdrm, mesa, and xf86-video-ati that are required to use 3D acceleration with the PlayStation 4 APU (Liverpool). They mostly just add the PCI ID required and a new chip type with the correct settings...Our intent is to get these upstreamed once performance and functionality are better verified."

Confirmation via Twitter.

The PlayStation 4 uses an AMD APU made up of two Jaguar quad-core modules and a semi-custom AMD GCN GPU with 18 compute units. It's fun to see that these Linux enthusiasts have got the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver already working for the hardware.