It has been a busy time for the Homebrew scene, in the past week we have already seen a Nintendo N3DS running Windows 95, and of course Fail0verflow hack the PS4 to run Linux. When the proof of concept was first released by Fail0verflow they played Pokemon on the PS4 system running on 2D drivers. The team said they had plans to get 3D drivers running on the machine which would allow 3D games, AAA titles to run on the console via Linux. https://twitter.com/fail0verflow/status/684079550943354880 "Linux on the PS4 actually makes a lot of sense, more than it ever did on any previous game console. It’s close enough to a PC that getting 3D acceleration working, while rather painful (as we’ve learned), seems entirely possible without undue amounts of effort (in a timeframe of months, not years), to the level needed for real indie games and even AAA titles, not just homebrew. And many thousands of indie and AAA games already run on Linux. Yes, SteamOS on the PS4 should “just work†once the driver issues are sorted out. We demoed a silly GBA emulator because all we had was a 2D framebuffer, but the real fun is getting 3D games to run just like they do on a PC (we’ve tried some commercial indie games already and they do work fine, just painfully slow as they are using software rendering right now, of course). Although the exploits used in our demo were our own work (we in fact had Linux booting, albeit in a very broken state, well before any PS4 exploits were publicly announced - porting Linux takes time), the fact that other teams have also been able to get kernel code execution proves the point that you really don’t need to depend on us for that aspect. We also have no doubt that vulnerabilities in the latest firmware can be found without too much trouble. Incidentally, everything is pure software. Hardware stuff was only used for research. There is not much reason to resort to hardware-based exploits on an architecture like the PS4, with a very wide attack surface and mediocre isolation." Fail0verflow have already stated that they will be working on the PS4 with the help of the modding community to create drivers and projects for the PS4, but they would not encourage work to enable piracy on the Playstation 4. However the probability of getting a Steam OS is looking like its getting ever closer...
