Tucked into their FAQ about the Steam Machine release was a mention about making your own Steam Machine by installing steamOS to a computer you already have. AMD only for now.
Tucked into their FAQ about the Steam Machine release was a mention about making your own Steam Machine by installing steamOS to a computer you already have. AMD only for now.
Well actually no, because consoles tend to have very divergent, oddball architecture, compared to normal PC x86_64, where it tends to be fairly to extremely difficult to basically reverse engineer the drivers… because the normal drivers there are propietary, Sony keeps em secret.
Instead, they seem to have been collaborating with AMD and basically some open source hackers to get FSR4 working on RDNA 3 GPUs… 7000 series AMD GPUs, the Steam Machine, etc.
You can run steamos on a jailbroken ps5 already. You need to be on a fairly old firmware though
PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series are all x86_64, though, unless I’m misunderstanding?
Yes but… they have varying degrees of nonstandard busses and timings and weird, proprietary, basicslly custom hardware, as well as often having weird, propietary implementations of that hardware, that often only work with a bunch of other weird custom drivers on other components…
This is why emulation is hard, you habe to reverse engineer all that shit and then basically virtualize it and then try to map it to actually standard hardware.
Making a linux distro runs into many of thr same things, just, without (as much of) the virtualization parts.
Consoles have really been getting closer to more standard hardware over the last years. The WiiU was a mostly custom PowerPC box, with a proprietary version of wifi for the gamepad, and including hardware specifically to run Wii games. The Switch was a barely modified nvidia shield, with bluetooth wireless controllers. The PS3 had a fully custom CPU, and old models included PS2 hardware for backwards compatibility, the PS4 is x86_64 with a custom AMD GPU.
For the PS4/PS5, the majority of effort on running Linux is in getting it to boot in the first place. While some hardware does require patches to existing drivers (like mesa on PS4), or sometimes fully custom drivers (like the CPU fan on PS4), other hardware is completely standard, over a standard interface. Like the HDD and Blu-Ray drives on the PS4.
The big difference is that a game console is “allowed” to deviate from standards, as it does not need to be compatible with anything outside the control of the manufacturer. This results in often small differences that require changes to a kernel which wouldn’t work on any other device.
The biggest reason why emulation is hard, is often no longer the custom hardware like it used to be, but the OS and other fully custom standards like a graphics API. The structure of games is completely different too. The old “ship the drivers on the game disc” like on the Wii no longer holds true on modern consoles, and emulators don’t need to ensure the exact timing of an optical drive matches to get a game to work.
There have been some attempts to get modern console games to work through kernel patches and translation layers, see horizon-linux and fpPS4, proving just how close modern console hardware is to standard PCs.
All that being said, I don’t think SteamOS on PS5 would work for multiple reasons. It’s extremely difficult to get the process simple enough for the average consumer, especially with Sony quickly patching any exploits required to boot it. It’s also not in Valve’s business interest to make it easier and explicitly supported to buy a cheaper and more powerful standardized machine. As they would just be creating a direct competitor to the Steam Machine.
Ah, yeah, good points. I imagine even just getting their wireless controller receiver working would be quite a lot of reverse engineering