Sony's PlayStation 4 Is Running Modified FreeBSD 9

[Luke_Wolf]

And where would you get a PC with Unified RAM? Nowhere.

Just because according to this fake report with doctored screenshots the PS4 OS is allegedly based on a PC operating system does not make the PS4 a normal PC.
Xbox One runs a version of Windows 8. Good luck getting X1 titles to run on normal PCs?

Unified RAM does not magically appear in PCs.

If you want to run it natively sure, in this case you're going to need to be emulating some hardware unless you're running a next gen AMD processor which isn't out yet. My entire point has been that getting these binaries to work is going to require both a lot of time and effort as well as modern upper midrange hardware just to run the things, not that it's going to just magically work on Ubuntu (which I don't even use, I use Fedora, openSUSE and Slackware across my various machines depending upon my needs for that computer). Now the Emulation layer will be a lot simpler as far less hardware needs to be emulated than any previous generation of console but you're still going to have to emulate some and it's still going to be a major pain.

[gamerk2]

Is this confirmed that Sony is writing their own graphics API rather than using OpenGL? That's a bit disappointing.

For comparisons sake, lets look at the PS3's graphical API's: you had PSGL, Sonys OpenGL ES 2.0 implementation, and libgcm, the low-level graphical library.

libgcm was the one developers most often used, as the necessity for speed was more imporant then using the OGL API.

Understand, on hardware-locked systems, you can double performance using native API's over middleware API's. That makes lower-level libraries far more attractive and usable.

I'm sure an OGL API will exist, but I doubt it will see substantial use.

[stevenc]

... all of them are explicit in that the copyright notice must ship with binaries, documentation, and advertising.

Newer forms of the license dropped the 'advertising clause', but yes the others are still required. When the PS4 starts shipping, a list of the BSD-licensed and other open source components will likely be detailed on a boring page in a manual, some small piece of paper and/or at some webpage such as: http://www.scei.co.jp/ps3-license/

[liamdawe]

It's interesting to know since I myself will be getting a PS4 thanks for the info Mike, nothing like sitting with a controller in your hand, on a cumfa sofa looking at a big tv sometimes it's what you need!

> Liam of GamingOnLinux.com

[gamerk2]

Probably bad stewardship or more along the lines Khronos is a democracy, Microsoft is a dictatorship. If Microsoft says "D3D is doing this." Its done. End of story. Khronos has more hoops to jump through, more people to make happy, and they seem to care about backwards compatibility in a more direct way. Meanwhile with DirectX, you have DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX11... Microsoft promises compatibility within your major version, and thats it. If you need to run DirectX9..you ship directX 9, you don't ship DirectX11 and then count on backwards compatibility.

Remember the most vocal users of OGL: the users of CAD software that hasn't even been ported to OGL2 yet. So yes, backward compatability is going to be a major issue with them.

[gamerk2]

Well you're going to need a modern upper midrange machine or better (preferably 8 cores and a GPU > 2TFLOPS) and you need to figure out just what changes sony made to their distribution of FreeBSD including whatever display server they're using (Probably not X.Org but their own thing) and port those over to Ubuntu and install the FreeBSD variants of various libraries and then you might be able to run them...

You DO know there's going to be a couple dozen layers of Sony system level API's that no OS other then whats on the PS4 is going to have a clue about, right? Or the fact devs WILL use *cute* optimizations because there's only one hardware spec?

So no, you aren't going to be able to pop in a PS4 disc and run it on a PC.

[gamerk2]

The fact is that Valve ported Left4Dead to Linux using OpenGL and the result was that the frame rate was about 10-20% higher than when booting onto Windows and using D3D on the very same machine. That was a fact in spite of the poorly written GPU drivers for Linux and despite how "unoptimized" OpenGL is. So just imagine how things would be if people really started working on the optimization bits on the Linux system and started optimizing the drivers. I'd say Windows and D3D would be smoked big time and I think Microsoft people know it which is why they put so much effort into spreading their FUD.

The performance argument is irrelevent. The issue is one of DEVELOPMENT. Developing in OGL is a PITA, as described back on page 6. OpenGL is the PRIMARY reason why developers do not port their titles to Linux.

Also remember Value is a special case: Their Source engine was origonally written in OGL, with DirectX being added in later. So Value, more then any other company, was in position to make a move back to OGL because the engine ALREADY SUPPORTED IT. And prehaps its no shock, the OGL native titles were the first to be ported over, while the titles that released only with a D3D9 renderer (TF2, LFD/LFD2) were the last titles brought over?

Maybe if people would stop cuddling obviously broken API's (make no mistake: OGL is functionally broken in design) Linux would be more attractive to develop for? But people like you are the primary reasons the entire open-source community is ignored by 95% of the marketplace.

[gamerk2]

Don't forget that "porting" to OpenGL means using the togl library, which translates DirectX to OpenGL on the fly (the game still thinks it's talking to a DirectX device). This translation layer should in theory slow things down, but the opposite is the case. That alone speaks for the efficiency of OpenGL.

I'm sure the OS had NOTHING to do with it. Or the drivers. Or the features that OGL doesn't support that likely freed up significant GPU time.

EDIT

Also worth noting is AMD's historically poor support of OGL; every time a major OGL title gets released on Windows (Doom 3/Rage come to mind), AMD cards ALWAYS get hit by significant performance issues. The fact the Windows OGL driver is very substandard could also be coming into play as well.

[Luke_Wolf]

You DO know there's going to be a couple dozen layers of Sony system level API's that no OS other then whats on the PS4 is going to have a clue about, right? Or the fact devs WILL use *cute* optimizations because there's only one hardware spec?

So no, you aren't going to be able to pop in a PS4 disc and run it on a PC.

You do know about these things called emulators and emulation layers right? and the fact that they even have it for the current generation of consoles right? Here's for the Wii http://www.dolphin-emulator.com/ here's for the PS3 http://playstation3emulator.net/ and here's for the XBox360 http://xbox360emulator.net/ (latter two I haven't used personally but was just using google to find). And you know that while you're going to have similar OS issues that the current gen consoles the hardware emulation is going to become a lot simpler right?

[yogi_berra]

OpenGL is the PRIMARY reason why developers do not port their titles to Linux.

If you click your heels together and say that three times you and Toto may actually be correct. Until then your market share is still too small to give a shit about.