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1. Embed this notice
   Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 16:36:57 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

   btw today is libreboot day. first release ever was on 12 december 2013

   today is 12 december 2024. therefore, today is libreboot's 11th birthday!

   https://libreboot.org/

   it's the free/opensource bios replacement that i maintain, based on coreboot.

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 21:11:56 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     @libreleah

     And the 30th anniversary of the playstation too

   • Embed this notice
     Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 21:11:56 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

     in reply to

     • Gwen Nelson

     @gwennelsonuk well. libreboot has playstation support. now we just have to somehow do something dinosaur related?

     https://libreboot.org/docs/install/playstation.html

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 21:11:57 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     @libreleah

     It's also dinosaur day!

   • Embed this notice
     Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 21:22:11 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

     in reply to

     • Gwen Nelson

     @gwennelsonuk you can literally build libreboot for the playstation and install it. works in emulators and on real hardware. it uses the pcsx-redux open bios

     you can use one of these boards:

     https://oshpark.com/profiles/mi213

     flash libreboot to a SST39VF040 or compatible 512k nor flash. you could also flash the original bios on another, and stack them; then with each one having otherwise isolated OE/CS, switch OE/CS (output enable / chip select). could wire it to a timer on the reset switch or something

   • Embed this notice
     Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 21:33:55 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

     in reply to

     • Psyhackological
     • Gwen Nelson

     @gwennelsonuk @psyhackological Yes well, the most scientific way to describe Libreboot's nature is to link the build system documentation:

     https://libreboot.org/docs/maintain/

     In the same way you can think of Debian as a Linux distribution, so too is Libreboot a coreboot distribution.

     As for binary blobs, Libreboot's policy on this is here:

     https://libreboot.org/news/policy.html

     The distro concept evolved over time, but Libreboot's primary purpose is to remove blobs when feasible, and to provide ideally free firmware.

   • Embed this notice
     Psyhackological (psyhackological@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 21:33:56 JST Psyhackological

     in reply to

     @libreleah is anything missing in libreboot compated to coreboot? I mean in the functionality only besides proprietary blobs.

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 21:33:56 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     • Psyhackological

     @psyhackological @libreleah

     Leah tends to add in stuff on top of coreboot, only removing nonfree blobs

   • Embed this notice
     Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Thursday, 12-Dec-2024 21:38:32 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

     in reply to

     • Psyhackological
     • Gwen Nelson

     @gwennelsonuk @psyhackological Naturally, Libreboot does provide a lot of patching on top of the various upstreams that it supports. For example, the GRUB payload in Libreboot contains native drivers for xHCI controllers and NVMe SSDs, whereas the upstream GNU GRUB project is missing these.

     Coreboot is heavily patched. In some cases, entire boards are supported in Libreboot, where they are not yet merged upstream - nowadays, some boards even appear in Libreboot first, or are stable there first.

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 02:26:03 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     @libreleah

     I read that and thought "surely you mean the PS4 and PS5, maybe the PS3 cos we have the firmware signing keys".

     But the PSX?

     That's crazy but really cool - kinda silly if you would then use it to run only proprietary games though.

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 02:26:04 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     @libreleah wait what

   • Embed this notice
     Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 02:26:29 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

     in reply to

     • Gwen Nelson

     @gwennelsonuk well there is PsNee, which is an opensource modchip firmware that runs on arduino.

     i suppose you could theoretically reduce a lot of that complexity by rewriting it for rp2040 or something.

     there's picostation, which is opensource firmware running on an rp2040. does optical disc emulation on the real console, letting you boot from sd card.

     finally, there is https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK open source devkit

     modchip still ideal to defeat the mechanon wobble check; can disable from bios

   • Embed this notice
     Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 02:29:07 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

     in reply to

     • Gwen Nelson

     @gwennelsonuk Interesting, Re PS3

     Regarding PS2, no there aren't any decent opensource modchips available I don't think. However, many people avoid the need for a modchip nowadays by running something like freemcboot from a pre-loaded memory card.

     I installed a modchip in that PS2 I gave you, because i'm oldschool. I could have just as easily sent you a freemcboot memory card with OPL and you'd probably be happy

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 02:29:08 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     @libreleah

     On the PS4 it's so similar to a normal PC that people installed Steam and the proprietary Nvidia drivers!

     They're not as tightly optimised as PSGL (Sony's answer to OpenGL), but it worked for running Portal on the PS4.

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 02:29:08 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     @libreleah

     PS2 has modchips that have their own firmware already, so I wonder if one could be used to support a totally libre way to run both PS2 games and the Linux bootloader.

     PS5 I'm not sure about, but I'd guess it's very very similar to the PS4 because it's just another glorified custom PC. If the GPU drivers work or only need slight modification, it'd be amazing to use with libre firmware cos it's a pretty powerful machine compared to the previous playstation consoles.

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 02:29:09 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     @libreleah

     Then I just reformatted the harddrive device and installed a Debian PPC base system to it, and then changed the kernel again to one without the busybox united, just normal Debian initrd.

     The original hack booted the kernel but had nothing to do except possibly NFS root, nobody thought to do the obvious.

     The advantage is you can mount the GameOS root too, it's just UFS.

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 02:29:09 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     @libreleah

     Makes for a nicer way to run a quality ftpd, or even just compiling GameOS code using the leaked SDK on the PS3 itself, then write to the GameOS partition and reboot.

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 02:29:10 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     @libreleah

     The PS3 would take a lot more work from scratch, but the hardware signing keys have been leaked so it's possible to run modded firmware.

     I have some in my shed somewhere hacked to run the devkit and debug firmware on a retail console - I also fixed a couple of trivial bugs in the Linux SDK that was leaked, and thought about cheekily submitting patches to Sony.

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 02:29:10 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     @libreleah

     Actually, I also remember getting Linux to boot from the harddrive after they removed OtherOS support back in the day - a lot of PS3 hackers took years to do that and then took all the credit cos I didn't announce my work.

     I thought it was too obvious.

     Basically you just need to set the root device when booting the kernel, you can't decrypt the OtherOS side while GameOS is booted, but you can just overwrite it.

     I used a kernel with internal initrd and busybox (cont)

   • Embed this notice
     Gwen Nelson (gwennelsonuk@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 13-Dec-2024 02:29:11 JST Gwen Nelson

     in reply to

     @libreleah

     Perhaps look into hacking the PS3 onwards, especially the PS4 should be easy to make run a libre bootloader.

     The PS3 is a more complicated platform, but the 4 and 5 are basically just weird PCs.

     The devkits actually use GRUB!

     I often wonder why Sony didn't use their own bootloader or the FreeBSD bootloader for the devkits.