PS4 OS runs on FreeBSD with GRUB bootloader: leak

VG Leaks has laid hands on information pertaining to the latest development kits that Sony has been kicking around for the PlayStation 4, and to their surprise, the PS4 seems to be running a variant of FreeBSD.

In the past Sony has had to do some major work for their consoles in terms of their operating systems. The Playstation (or PSX or later the PSOne) and Playstation 2 were both based on MIPS processors, which required Sony to build a specialised operating system for the console’s development and to run games on.

The Playstation 3 abandoned MIPS processors and broke backwards compatibility, using the IBM PowerPC-like Cell processor and a brand new operating system based on Linux, developed in-house by Sony’s engineers in conjunction with IBM. Although Linux-based, the OS did not resemble any Linux distribution available to the public and was considered unique.

Sony has once again broken compatibility and moved to the x86 platform using hardware supplied by AMD, but this time that hardware is similar to what consumers will be able to buy later this year. Because of the complexity that PS3 developers had to previously account for in their games, the PS3 was notoriously difficult to port games to and had loads of system-specific limitations that didn’t apply to any other system.

In February 2013 veteran developer Mark Cerny, Sony’s appointed chief architect of the PS4, told the world that Sony moved to the x86 architecture to allow more game developers to make games for the console in an environment that they already understood.

The spy shots from VG Leaks shows the Orbis development kit booting up using the GRUB 2.0 bootloader. GRUB is a program commonly used to boot Linux-based operating systems and can be used to replace the boot loaders of other OSes, such as Windows and OS X. The use of FreeBSD is surprising because no-one expected Sony to use an off-the-shelf OS for their console – in previous years they’ve built their OSes from the ground up to allow for as much performance as possible.

Microsoft’s Xbox One contains hardware that is largely similar to the PS4, but differs vastly in its development environment. The rival console uses three software environments to function – a Hypervisor of Microsoft’s creation, a stripped-down Windows kernel for running games and another Windows kernel for running the console’s internet services, social networking and background updating feature.

FreeBSD’s license isn’t part of the GPL and caters more towards businesses that may have a use for it, but don’t want proprietary source code to be distributed to the community. Similarly, companies can take code from FreeBSD and use it in their own software under a different license.