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

[schmidtbag]

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

The rest of the system is good enough. I think a quad core at a higher frequency would've been better than the CPU it uses now, and they also need to figure out that unified memory problem. But other than that, it could still be used to play a few games. Probably no modern AAA titles though.

If I didn't already have a gaming PC better than this, I would seriously consider getting a PS4. The vast majority of games I personally would want to play will either be PC-only (as either linux native or wine compatible) or available on PS4. One device to play that much variety is impressive and convenient. I already have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, I happen to already have a PS4 controller (they're the best gamepads for PC, in my opinion), PS4 already has plenty of decent media playback features, and if I really need the extra storage I can always do a NAS or USB 3.0 SSD.

[SystemCrasher]

Not surprising, granted PS4 is basically a heavily locked down PC running some crippled/modded freebsd 9. Ironically, FreeBSD is utterly bad in terms of GCN GPUs support. That's how BSD freedom performs in practice...

[dibal]

Some PS4 specials on Page 51: http://meseec.ce.rit.edu/756-project...ng2014/1-3.pdf

[[Knuckles]]

Get me the hardware video decoder working and Kodi running and it's a perfect match to replace my aging media center machine

[Nille]

Get me the hardware video decoder working and Kodi running and it's a perfect match to replace my aging media center machine

A Wetec Box from OpenElec should satisfy you. There are also DVB-S2/C/T receivers in this boxes for PVR. Btw, you can also flash android on this boxes or buy them with android on it. and ofc you can flash openelec on the android boxes

[sarmad]

How different are BSD drivers from Linux drivers? Can the original PS4 BSD driver be used on Linux somehow?

[stiiixy]

A Wetec Box from OpenElec should satisfy you. There are also DVB-S2/C/T receivers in this boxes for PVR. Btw, you can also flash android on this boxes or buy them with android on it. and ofc you can flash openelec on the android boxes

And install Kodi on Android, alongside the Kore Android software remote control! Ahh, the endless opportunities

[Luke_Wolf]

How different are BSD drivers from Linux drivers? Can the original PS4 BSD driver be used on Linux somehow?

The short answer: no

The long answer is that the Playstation OS has as much to do with FreeBSD proper as Android does to Linux, and it's going to be the same situation with the PS drivers as it was with the android drivers but with sony likely to be even less nice about it.

[rabcor]

Seems the PS4 just got a lot more useful. Why don't Sony just support this out of the box? I mean come on. They used to with PS3, why'd the change their minds?

[DMJC]

I haven't looked into the PS4 SDK, but to my knowledge the PS4 uses an API similar to Vulkan/Metal to handle 3d Graphics and does not use OpenGL. Now because the APU is essentially a PC graphics card, it is capable of a full GL stack, but that doesn't mean that performance on Linux is going to be comparable to performance on OrbisOS (the PS4 OS). The NVIDIA OpenGL driver rips out the entire graphics stack and replaces it with their GL stack. There's no trace of Mesa's GLX within NVIDIA's Driver. The same can be expected with the PS4's graphics libraries. Hell the PS4 doesn't even use X11 as it's GUI. It uses its own framebuffer or something provided by the PS4 Media Bar.