Re: JailStation: FreeBSD for game consoles

>That was uncalled for. It was disrespectful. The text was very readable,
the flow from one idea to the >next was good. It may have been llm
generated, but it didn't pop out to me as slop. It was on topic >for
hackers. It falls short of what we expect from the community. It was little
more than a pure attack >that doesn't even have the excuse that it engaged
the technical ideas.

Finally someone admitted that a text written with LLM can be good. Maybe
one day someone else will admit that a whole project written with LLM
deserves to be taken in consideration if it is well done,documented,working
and capable of increasing the tools available to FreeBSD.

Maybe one day many more developers will stop saying that's only a slop and
they could be more respectful and they will begin to evaluate contributions
based on the usefulness of the idea and the code. We look forward to seeing
this happen more frequently.

On Mon, Aug 10, 2026 at 3:43 PM Warner Losh <[email protected]> wrote:

> That was uncalled for. It was disrespectful. The text was very readable,
> the flow from one idea to the next was good. It may have been llm
> generated, but it didn't pop out to me as slop. It was on topic for
> hackers. It falls short of what we expect from the community. It was little
> more than a pure attack that doesn't even have the excuse that it engaged
> the technical ideas.
>
> Warner
>
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 5:13 AM Leo Lundberg <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> I don't want to see this kind of llm-blight inundating the mailing list.
>> I don't know how others feel but this kind of droning salespitch-esque
>> llm-text is something I've had more than enough of these days.
>>
>> / Leo
>>
>> 2026年8月10日 12:20:49 GMT+02:00、Abdelkader Boudih <[email protected]> より:
>> >Hi hackers,
>> >
>> >On July 23rd, I pushed JailStation to Codeberg. I will mirror it to
>> GitHub later; I am currently experimenting with some Forgejo-based
>> infrastructure.
>> >
>> >JailStation is FreeBSD for game consoles.
>> >
>> >This is not a platform for running SLOPOS games (Sony Licensed
>> Obsolescence Proprietary Operating System), or MicroSlop Xbox games. We
>> already have emulators for that with lot of angry people on it.
>> >
>> >JailStation is mainly two experiments.
>> >
>> >The first one is: what happens if an operating system considers the GPU
>> non-optional ?
>> >
>> >Modern operating systems still largely treat the CPU as the center of
>> the machine and the GPU as a device hanging off it. But on a modern
>> console, the GPU is a huge part of the machine, and we know it is always
>> there.
>> >
>> >So what if we invert that relationship?
>> >
>> >The CPU becomes more of a butler: it handles the things CPUs are good
>> at, while the OS provides primitives for building GPU-first applications
>> and moving suitable workloads away from the CPU.
>> >
>> >I dont know yet how far this idea can reasonably go. That is part of the
>> experiment.
>> >
>> >The second experiment is fixed hardware.
>> >
>> >A normal FreeBSD installation has to discover what machine it landed on.
>> It may have an Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA GPU, different chipsets, different
>> storage controllers, different firmware, and thousands of possible
>> combinations of hardware.
>> >
>> >A PlayStation does not wake up wondering what GPU it has.
>> >
>> >For a particular console revision, we already know most of the machine
>> before the kernel starts. That gives us an interesting opportunity to
>> investigate how much hardware probing, generic initialization,
>> compatibility machinery, and boot-time work can simply disappear when the
>> OS targets a known machine.
>> >
>> >The goal is not to turn FreeBSD into a PlayStation compatibility layer.
>> The consoles are simply cheap, powerful, mass-produced computers with
>> unusually well-defined hardware and lot of Slop ( PS4's **custom** APU
>> output Display port , that get converted to HDMI by a second chip).. it
>> custom, why didn't make it HDMI first ?
>> >
>> >There is also a preservation angle to this.
>> >
>> >With the recent direction toward increasingly digital and
>> vendor-controlled consoles, I expect the traditional game console to
>> largely disappear within the next decade or 2.
>> >
>> >At some point the question becomes: why buy a 1000$ vendor-locked brick
>> just to play online ? I can buy a proper USB gamepad and a computer instead.
>> >
>> >But that leaves behind millions of perfectly capable machines.
>> >
>> >A PS4 does not suddenly become bad hardware because Sony stops caring
>> about it. It still has an x86-64 CPU, an AMD GPU, unified memory, storage,
>> networking, USB, and a remarkably consistent hardware platform.
>> >
>> >So another goal of JailStation is to make these machines boring
>> computers.
>> >
>> >I have FreeBSD 16 running on the PS3-4-5 and the Xbox 360.
>> >
>> >And because this is FreeBSD, naturally the first thing I did after
>> escaping the vendor's jail was build another os with jails.
>> >
>> >The project is still experimental, but it is now far enough along that I
>> wanted to let the wider FreeBSD community know about it and get feedback
>> from people interested in GPU, boot, console, and platform work.
>> >
>> >I had lot of small experiment in multiple repos , so now i spend some
>> free time to centralize them and retest them.
>> >
>> >So in short, in JS the kernel is not built for each Station with only
>> options that exist  in that console.  No firewire, pcmcia, thunderbolt in a
>> PS3-5.
>> >
>> >And if all of this sounds crazy, that probably means I’m on the right
>> path.
>> >
>> >P.S. All of this was built by AGI, with ASI providing the occasional
>> approving *nod*. AI was only used to double-check things before I commit.
>> >
>> >For disclosure purposes:
>> >
>> >AGI:  Abdelkader General Intelligence
>> >ASI:  Adrian Specialized Intelligence (Adrian Chadd)
>> >
>> >Regards,
>> >Abdelkader (Not ASI yet)
>>
>>

-- 
Mario.