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Forums - Sony - Sony's PlayStation 4 Is Running Modified FreeBSD 9

gooch_destroyer on 24 June 2013

Posted by Michael Larabel on June 23, 2013

The operating system at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 4 is FreeBSD 9.0.

It's been exposed that the operating system powering the PlayStation 4 is Orbis OS, which is a Sony spin of FreeBSD 9.0. It's not a huge surprise FreeBSD is being used over Linux, in part due to the more liberal licensing. The PlayStation 4 is x86_64 based now rather than Cell-based, which makes it easier to use FreeBSD.

It's a bit of a surprise to see FreeBSD being used though when at the heart of the Sony PS4 is an AMD eight-core APU with Radeon graphics. There isn't a Catalyst driver available for any BSD operating system right now and the open-source driver ported from Linux with Radeon KMS and Gallium3D is still in a primitive state. Thus, Sony in cooperation with AMD must have developed their own graphics driver for the PlayStation 4 with FreeBSD or at least ported the Catalyst code-base to BSD.

The information of FreeBSD 9.0 powering the PlayStation 4 was shared at VGLeaks.com and based upon a second-gen development kit for the forthcoming console.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NDI


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avais1993 on 24 June 2013

Rightt, for the less technical people here, what does this mean?



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Bajablo on 24 June 2013
avais1993 said:
Rightt, for the less technical people here, what does this mean?

Pretty much nothing.. perhaps that you will be able to make it do what you like a bit more easily than the last consoles. Since it is mostly a familiar OS.



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Heavenly_King on 24 June 2013

Is this good? Because I dont know a thing about OS.



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ironmanDX on 24 June 2013

Why don't they just develop their own OS based around the hardware? They started the PS4 in 2007 wasn't it?



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LemonSlice on 24 June 2013
Heavenly_King said:

Is this good? Because I dont know a thing about OS.

It's neither good or bad. It pretty much makes no difference to you or me.



Heavenly_King on 24 June 2013
ironmanDX said:
Why don't they just develop their own OS based around the hardware? They started the PS4 in 2007 wasn't it?

I guess it is a similar case to the smartphones right now.  They use android because it is free and good; and there are already plenty of tools for it.  So this OS is free; for what they are doing is good; and as it has more time in the developer space, it has more tools for it.

I really dont know if the OS is good or not, since I have only used in my life Windows, MacOS, and tried android in some phone.



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ironmanDX on 24 June 2013
Heavenly_King said:
ironmanDX said:
Why don't they just develop their own OS based around the hardware? They started the PS4 in 2007 wasn't it?

I guess it is a similar case to the smartphones right now.  They use android because it is free and good; and there are already plenty of tools for it.  So this OS is free; for what they are doing is good; and as it has more time in the developer space, it has more tools for it.

I really dont know if the OS is good or not, since I have only used in my life Windows, MacOS, and tried android in some phone.

Yeah, you're probably right. Hopefully they've been optimizing the OS around the hardware as it was developed. I can't see why they wouldn't.



ethomaz on 24 June 2013

Catalyst for what?

The drivers in consoles are not developed over the OS because there are no concurrence between OS and Games for the GPU... the driver have direct access to GPU to avoid overhead present in PC drivers.

In fact you only loss performance using the Catalyst.

Even Xbone didn't use the Catalyst like it was on PC.

And FreeBSD is a obvious choice... any change that Sony do in Linux they need to release the source code to public but the BSD lincense allow that Sony merge open souce code with proprietary code without release the source to community.



VetteDude on 24 June 2013
ironmanDX said:
Why don't they just develop their own OS based around the hardware? They started the PS4 in 2007 wasn't it?


Sony sucks at software if that wasn't apparant. XMB is a great simple OS for TV's, but once on PSP and PS3, it got too crowded, slow, and irrititating.