FreeBSD Running On PS3 127
An anonymous reader writes "One week after Sony's PlayStation 3 private cryptography key was obtained, FreeBSD is up and running on the PS3. Nathan Whitehorn writes: 'Yesterday, I imported support for the Sony Playstation 3 into our 64-bit PowerPC port, expanding our game console support into the current generation. There are still a few rough edges due to missing hardware support, but the machine boots and runs FreeBSD stably. These rough edges should be smoothed out in time for the 9.0 release.'" Update: 01/10 15:04 GMT by KD : As several commenters have pointed out, the submission was misleading in that BSD runs in OtherOS, making no use of the cracked keys.
Firmware 3.21 (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA:
Supported hardware:
- Sony Playstation 3 Fat, firmware version 3.21
- Netbooting only
- 480i/480p only
!News
Running in OtherOS, not natively (Score:5, Informative)
There is no relation to the cracked keys, as it runs in the OtherOS mode. I.e. instead of Linux, you can run FreeBSD in OtherOS.
*NOT* related to the recent crypto break (Score:5, Informative)
This is *NOT* related to the recent crypto break, as demonstrated by the release note stating
Supported hardware:Sony Playstation 3 Fat, firmware version 3.21
Francois Grieu
Cool - no hardware hack required (Score:5, Informative)
I was worried at first that I'd have to burn a chip or something equally prone to destroying an expensive toy... but after I actually researched it... here [ozlabs.org], I find that you don't have to mod the PS3 at all - you just have to create a disk that looks like a game disk to the PS3.
And if you want to go back to PS3 behavior, you just reset the PS3 box.
Now that is a cool hack.
Re:Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.. (Score:4, Informative)
http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/09/military-purchases-2200-ps3s/ [cnn.com]