The Scoop on the Xbox 360's Embedded OS? 504
An anonymous reader writes "When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each, WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, 'What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?' Now, the website thinks it has found the answer to its question. No, it's not Linux or BSD, nor a derivative of Longhorn or Windows CE."
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
WHAT A SHOCK!
redundant yes but the whole article is stupid in this regard - I didn't even know we were having wiiild speculations into what os it has - like it would never matter to the end user who never sees it.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
Honestly, I don't know where these silly rumors come from. [apple.com]
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
The original version of NT was targeted at Intel's i860. There were versions of NT for MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and x86. I don't recall if support for MIPS and PowerPC was dropped before or after NT 4.0 was released. Later service packs only supported Alpha and x86. The NT kernel was designed from the begining to be portable.
Despite all the bellyacheing the NT kernel was well designed and is good solid code.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Where can I get a trial copy this Windows "lite" edition?
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
KERNEL.EXE is now in ELF format... (Score:3, Funny)
If you don't believe me, just pop a Konsole on it and type "uname -a"; there it is, right in front of you:
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Stricken nerve, check.
Too easy. Catch ya next time, sucker.
Re:Disinformation (Score:3, Interesting)
Modding your X-Box going forward isn't going to be much of an issue for Microsoft. You can't use X-Box Live with a modded XBox and Microsoft wants to ensure that everyone is online. So all their games with be Live enabled. Microsoft is going to use Live to distribute levels and authenticate games, even if you're not playing online at the time. Modding your XBox t
Re:Wow (Score:2)
My question is. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My question is. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My question is. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess my point is : if the dev kits are using G4's PowerPC, does it make the console easier to crack ?
Re:My question is. . . (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My question is. . . (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My question is. . . (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My question is. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, Microsoft probably didn't profit from the sale of that Xbox, and in fact renting the titles probably did contribute something to the vendors.
Re:My question is. . . (Score:2)
Thus Microsoft profited when they sold him the Xbox, but all the game vendors and developers lost out.
No, Microsoft did not profit. Remember, they're selling the xbox at a loss, expecting to make to money back on the games. It's entireley in their interest to make it difficult to pirate games for their system.
Re:My question is. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, security has been a big thing with MS in the last few years. I'll rephrase that - managing public perception of security has been a big thing for MS lately. I can't imagine that they'd deliberately build in security flaws... well, not as a matter of marketing policy... well, I still don't believe it, anyway.
So that leaves the question as to whether they have learned enough from the original XBox to make XBox2 impossible to hack. I have problems with "impossible" in this context. The harder they lock it down, the harder they make it for partners to port to their platform. Since MS' in house games studios still lack the output to satisfy demand solo, they're somewhat dependant on goodwill to get ports of cool games from other platforms. And where they make those allowances, that's where the next generation of hacks will come.
The online game thing? Well yes, that's unavoidable. On the other hand, I think there's a backlash brewing against these subscription games. I'm old enough to remember the first wave of computer moderated play-by-mail games and they dirty tricks some of them used to extort money from the players once they had invested deeply enough. From what I've read of most of the MMOGs, it's the same sort of scam, and people seem to be becoming aware of that.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a fad. Just like video arcade games largely died off when home computers got good enough graphics to compete, so will the online ones when some free alternative gets good enough.
Re:My question is. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Care to elaborate on that? Because I can't see the connection.
What makes it easy or hard for partners to port to their platform is the OS itself, and the quality of the SDK and tools provided by MS. Microsoft has long been very good at giving devs what they want.
The original Xbox required developers to get their copy signed off by MS. I see absolutely no reason why they can't add security without adding to that
Re:My question is. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
In the 80's, yes. I don't believe they do so today. First off, at the speed hardware is changing it's not worth the effort to microoptimize like that.
Not to mention the fact that the thing does have an API and an OS. Those things were nonexistant before, which encouraged that kind of stuff.
Secondly, the platform isn't static. Revisions to the OS and hardware occur. Using undocumented stuff is putting yourself at great risk of having your code break.
But the more they tighten the secuirity model, the more strictly compliant the ported code will need to be.
IIRC, the only security holes found so far in the original X-box which didn't require a modchip were buffer overrun failures. Not due to using 'undocumented features' of any sort, but rather a simple programming error.
Microsoft could easily fix that by having a nonexecutable stack, for instance. That would not put any additional requirements whatsoever on the programmers.
I don't buy it. Could you give a real example of a program using an undocumented feature, and also explain how it constituted a security problem?
Re:My question is. . . (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone else know how to spell 'monopoly'?
Re:My question is. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Ask me when MS isn't a distant second in the video game market.
Despite popular belief, MS can't just go make a monopoly. They actually need a little help from their customers. I realize this is a tough pill to swallow, but it's true. I'm surprised these little cracks fly around even though IIS isn't king, Sony and Palm are still around, and Logitech is still producing mice and keyboards.
Re:My question is. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
MS has had competitors in the past. Big, strong ones with better products or more recognition or a foot already in the door. But by moving slowly along the line in their own way, they somehow manage
You don't understand the word monopoly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You don't understand the word monopoly either (Score:3, Insightful)
Did you even read that article? (Score:3, Informative)
And if you read the article you posted, the doom and gloom predictions were because the PS2 didn't have much for games at launch, and th
Take the blinders off. (Score:4, Insightful)
Being too fucking dense to read what you are replying to is bad enough, but being so arrogant as to pretend you are being ignored because you aren't participating in group think is beyond rediculous. Wake up, nobody wants to try to converse with someone who will only ignore what they say and continue arguing with straw men and red herrings.
You decided based on your own twisted view of the world that I am some anti-MS crusader. This is obvious from you complaining about "people like me" using a dollar sign in MS, despite me not doing that, and telling me to complain about Sony, when Sony isn't doing what MS is.
And just so you know, I hate Sony. They have a hidden control panel in their monitors (at least some models) that you can only access using a special cable and special software, which of course only sony authorized repair centers can get. So if there is a power surge and your monitors contrast gets set WAY too high (above what you can even set with the user control panel) then you have to pay $250 for some overpaid fuckstick to plug in a cable and press "reset to factory settings" on this gay software. While I am not a huge fan of MS, because of this monitor scam I outright despise Sony.
But that doesn't change the fact that MS is a convicted monopolist using money from a monopoly that has held PC technology back for years to push their way into a new market with a product that loses money. Why would you expect everyone to be complaining about Sony when they aren't doing this, and MS is?
Re:My question is. . . (Score:3, Informative)
1. Get a monopoly in something.
2. Sell something else at a lose using your profits from Step 1.
3. Get a new monopoly, profit! and repeat.
Re:My question is. . . (Score:2)
Re:My question is. . . (Score:3, Informative)
Until the most recent price wars, Nintendo never sold a unit at a loss, now each GC is sold at several dollars below cost, which is quickly repaid by the hundreds of thousands of sales in zelda and mario games.
Sega is the only company that was unable to turn a profit on
Re:My question is. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, many "entertainment" technologies are almost entirely predicated on making copies - iPod, vcr, dvd writer, high speed DSL, etc.
And seriously, how many non-graphic artists do you know that own a legit version of Photoshop? People just do duplicate software. It's not a lost sale becuase that person would never buy the product for $500+ anyway. But get it for free from a friend, no problem.
And what about mere loaner copies? I have lent people books so that they didn't have to get their own copies. I have done the same with CDs and DVDs and whatever else over time. There's lots of ways to avoid putting money into the system while still making use of the thing that the money was supposed to get you.
That's just the way things are. Everyone knows this. I just weep for your fragile grasp of economic realities
Re:My question is. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Though I'd like to know how you (or others) would feel if we replaced all occurrances of "Microsoft" and "game developers" in your post with "the RIAA" and "musicians," respectively.
Re:My question is. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you have any idea how much it takes to make an operating system these days?
500 million is TYPICAL. To even suggest someone could do it for less is LUNACY!!
Operating systems take upwards of 500 people to make. This isnt the old days where you could just throw together some OS in your garage and get other people around the
Three letters... (Score:5, Funny)
First Power chips on the X-box (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First Power chips on the X-box (Score:2)
(I know you were just kidding, but
PowerPC vs Intel (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:PowerPC vs Intel (Score:3, Insightful)
MS use PPC because it's better, in this case because of its lower heat output. they can do this because a console is designed mostly from scratch so components can be chosen on their qualities. with general computing, there's so much investment in x86 that a lot of people have to go with it whether its crap or not. just like many people have to go with Windows and Office even though they wouldn't consider touching it if they were working from a clean slate.
Re:PowerPC vs Intel (Score:5, Interesting)
OSX core is open source Darwin, which already runs on Intel processors. I would bet that deep inside Apple, they maintain a fully functional OSX on typical Wintel hardware (speculation only but why wouldn't Apple make the effort? Sort of a hedge against CPU lock-in).
I think a more interesting line of speculation is: Is Apple developing, or thinking of developing, an OSX version for the new CELL processor? After all, IBM surely thinks that CELL will eventually replace conventional CPUs. IBM and Apple usually work pretty close together when it comes to future CPUs for Apple's OS. I can't imagine that Apple hasn't at least discussed it with IBM.
Re:PowerPC vs Intel (Score:3, Insightful)
An even better question is "If the XBox 360 runs on a powerPC-like CPU, will MSFT start selling W2K for the G5?" that'd be a fine how-do-you-do. "Dear Steve, we're releasing a fully compatible 'Windows 2k5 for OS X'. It's a trick we learned from IBM. gg.--Love, Bill"
Re:PowerPC vs Intel (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, one thing I've see
Windows 3.11?? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Windows 3.11?? (Score:2)
Perhaps they will have preinstalled Trumpet Winsock for us.
Launched? (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh. (Score:5, Informative)
That was certainly a surprise. Oh wait, no it wasn't.
IBM is making out well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IBM is making out well (Score:5, Insightful)
3 out of 4, you mean... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:IBM is making out well (Score:2, Funny)
Re:IBM is making out well (Score:2)
Re:IBM is making out well (Score:5, Funny)
I've heard that IBM is thinking of supporting Linux, too...
What OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What OS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What OS? (Score:2)
Re:What OS? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why, as long as they keep on reading your ATM card and spitting out money properly, most people don't care a whole lot which OS their ATM machine runs.
The only reason we really have "OS wars" today is because people have differing opinions on the way things should be presented on the screen to them as an interactive user of said OS. (And secondarily, technical debates on such things as security
Most of the time, when someone expresses a strong preference for Mac OS X, they're really expressing a fondness for the overall look and feel of the GUI.... Perhaps they favor the drap and drop nature of everything, with file management being done by symbolic folders that automatically open up when you hold the mouse button down while pointing at one? Maybe OS X Tiger users just fell in love with the Dashboard widgets or the Spotlight search feature, or who knows?
Same with any other OS I can think of. Even MS-DOS users argued for it because of it's stark simplicity. "Only one exact way to do a specific task... no confusion of "What does the picture on my screen do that looks like *this*?" Easy to write down a step-by-step instruction sheet so anyone who can type can get a task done in it.
None of these things really matter on a system that nobody interfaces with directly very often. If it just serves up web pages or files or acts as a back-end to a database, or whatever
Re:What OS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Faeries... (Score:5, Funny)
What a letdown! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What a letdown! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What a letdown! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What a letdown! (Score:2, Interesting)
I *was* watching Citizen Kane...now, what's the point?
Re:What a letdown! -- *Spoiler Alert* (Score:3, Funny)
The movie came out in 1941 for God's sake! How long do you expect everyone to tiptoe around you?
Oh, and the Planet of the Apes is the future Earth.
Bruce Willis? Dead.
Kaiser Sose? Verbal.
Mac! (Score:2, Interesting)
Could you imagine Microsoft getting in bed with Apple. ewww...
DevKits (Score:5, Interesting)
From a hackability POV, it's the BIOS that really matters. The original xbox had the BIOS hidden in the VGA chip (or was it the Southbridge? Can't remember) but once Bunnie Huang scoped the buses everything was lost. I think we can expect to see some fairly high grade encryption at work in both the POST and code signing arenas.
The server's dying... (Score:2, Informative)
When the Xbox 360 was launched two weeks ago amid much brouhaha over its custom-designed IBM PowerPC-based CPU with 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2GHz each, WindowsForDevices.com wondered aloud, "What OS runs inside the Xbox 360?"
We offered a few alternatives and called on our readers for their ideas on the subject. Now, we think we have the answer to our question.
But first, a bit of background.
As we stated in our previous story on this topic, the earlier Xbox (shown at
Re:The server's dying... (Score:2)
Why anyone doesn't think that this is probably the case is beyond me. Why would I write an OS if I could use one that had a lot of what I needed? Strip down NT 4 and give it a nice overhaul to work with your sole hardware spec. Seems to make sense to me. I think the developer quoted probably felt the features of the XBox 360 OS were derivative of the
Coral Cache (Score:3, Informative)
Big deal? (Score:2)
Xbox exploits? (Score:2)
-- n
coral cache (Score:2)
mirror [nyud.net]
Win 2k Is already ppc ported (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows NT existed on a number of different architectures other than Intel x86, Including MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC, in versions 3.5 3.51 and 4.0.
The final point to make is that when the work began on Windows 2000, the entire OS was done. The full NT5 beta available from the MSDN when it was released. Did indeed include a PowerPC version as well as the others. ( at least one beta did as far as i can confirm from my discourses with other "wisened veterans" (no mater what their age) of the MS oses. )
The effort involved in MS porting the NT 5 kernel and other systems to the Xbox 360 would have been totaly comparable to the effort needed to strip and optimise the nt 5 core for the Xbox. Which is in fact a very impressive degree of refinement over the original os when you examine the finer details.
( My other boxes are FreeBSD and Solaris so dont dare call me a MS fan, XP is for my games only case wine isnt good enough and i pray it catches up sooner. )
Re:Win 2k Is already ppc ported (Score:2)
missing option (Score:2, Funny)
Dev's Already Jumping Ship (Score:2, Troll)
No matter what hype they spin, developers have been grumbling about the Xbox 360 design from day one as the specs were released, and now dev'
Quoth the article (Score:2, Funny)
So, in other words, it runs DOS 5.1
You're all wrong. It's actually OS/2 WARP! (Score:4, Funny)
DUH. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:DUH. (Score:4, Insightful)
> Windows has the HAL that can absorb hardware differences, so there's no room for Linux and the
> like.
When the Mac came out in '84, M$ told the DOS heads that using their keyboard macros was so much faster than using a mouse that using the mouse and gui will never make it into mainstream business. They published statistics to prove it. Then Windows came out, and M$ told them how great the mouse and gui was, and they switched over in droves, their past biases completely removed from their memory banks.
When the web started taking off in the early '90s, M$ told the faithful that the web was a waste of time. It was run by Universities and will never be applicable to the modern business world. Hell, you had to jump through hoops to even get windows running TCP/IP back then. Then M$ came out with IE, and told everyone that it is the business app of the future. All of the windows heads developed mass amnesia, and told us all how M$ runs the internet.
History says that if M$ changed their stance and started pushing Linux, embrased and extended into proprietary hell, of course, then all the current Linux haters will tell you how great M$ Linux is, and forget they ever bashed it.
M$s main power is brainwashing. They coddle the non-free-thinking masses and give them a sense of community in their M$ness. They will blindly follow whatever Redmond tells them, as long as they have Linux and Apple or whoever to despise. Hated is the easiest way to bind any community.
jfs
Smoke (Score:2)
All electronic computing devices run on smoke. Because once you let the smoke out, it quits working.
I can see it now... (Score:2)
Norton Internet Security For XBOX....
Guaranteed to drop your framerates by 75%
Of course, it can second as a "game genie" effect by slowing the whole system down enough to make it boringly easy.
or...
How long until we've got 100,000 XBOX drones spamming and breaking into networks?
"Unknown port of WindowsCE" (Score:2)
Why is this a surprise? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's Power PC? So? They had a Power PC NT kernel, for the CHRP motherboards, and most of the NT kernel is C and C++ and has to be portable at least to Alpha and Itanium, so building most of it for Power PC would be just a recompile. It's not like the software just vanished when the CHRP 'market' collapsed.
Hmmm... billg said it was impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, this is just one more project branch to maintain. They now have Win2K, WinXP Home Edition, WinXP Pro, Win2003 server, WinCE and now another version for the XBox. For the server editions they need to support standard, enterprise and data center versions. And I think there is a version for the tablet PC, or is it just WinCE? No wonder MS wants cheaper code monkeys, keeping all the versions maintained and in synch has got to be a labor intensive nightmare.
Re:Hmmm... billg said it was impossible (Score:3, Informative)
Also, I don't think it runs IE at all. Could be wrong, though.
I'm not sure how thrilled the average home user would be with this OS on their PC.
Seems a little obvious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 9X compatibility wasn't a requirement so could be ignored, CE was optimised for lower power CPUs and had been a less than a stellar success in the Dreamcast, whilst the NT/2000 codebase was optimised for higher end processors x86/PPC/MIPS/Alpha. It would seem that the choice was obvious. I dare say that MS stripped it down so that it's just the kernel of 2000 with thin wrappers of DirectX on top of the drivers together with a the minimum requirements of Win32 to keep DirectX and OpenGL running.
If we jump ahead to now, it seems obvious that MS would carry on using the same platform - just this time using the PPC branch of 2000, build new drivers and probably add more Win32 stuff to support the XNA architecture. If anything it seems unthinkable that they would use anything but an NT kernel.
I would be more interested to know if Win360 (I know this is Slashdot and Microsoft is only interesting when it's monopolising the cure for cancer etc - but just allow me to wonder a moment!) supports
vaXbox (Score:3, Funny)
MacOSX (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Heathens! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Heathens! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So Is This What Microsoft Means (Score:2)