Re: JailStation: FreeBSD for game consoles

"Abdelkader Boudih" <[email protected]> writes:

> 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.

Show the link or there is no deal! :)

>
> 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)

Regards,
Dmitry

-- 
https://wiki.freebsd.org/DmitrySalychev