IraqiGeek’s Blog

What can an Xbox 360 running Linux do?

December 5, 2005 on 2:00 am | In Linux |

I wonder how long, we will have to wait until the Xbox 360 is hacked, and some form of Linux port is run on this machine. It’s just a matter of time until someone figures out a way to hack the Xbox 360 protection, and figures out a way to get Linux up and running on this gaming console. We may even get a whole Linux distribution targeted at the Xbox 360.

While the Xbox 360 is sold as a gaming console, under the hood, it packs a lot of processing power that is on par with a powerful server that costs about 30 times the price of this $299 console. Its true that a server costing $10,000 will pack much more RAM, a hell lot more storage space, and be designed from the ground up for reliability and 24/7 availability, but I will bet that the Xbox 360 with its IBM powered triple cores running at 3.2GHz will give a lot of those servers a run for their money when it comes to processing power, even though it only runs on 512MB of RAM.

If we look a little closer at game consoles, while they may not be designed by the same high standards as the server market products, they are still designed with enough robustness to tolerate extremely long operation hours. Think of 12+ hours a day. Generally speaking, your average piece of hardware reaches thermal equilibrium about after 20 minutes of operation. If any component wants to fail, it will fail not so long after that, mostly due to thermal stress. Gaming consoles are generally manufactured with pretty high standards, probably even higher than many brand name computers which cost a lot more. In fact, gaming consoles are designed to tolerate a lot more abuse, require minimum to no maintenance, and survive a longer life cycle than your average PC. After all, no one will buy a console that fails after a few months of hard core gaming.

Personally, I think that the Xbox 360 makes for a better and more practical hardware platform than the Play Station 3 will make. This is mainly due to the choice of processing platform that each console uses. While both will be powered by an IBM made chip, the Cell processor on the PS3 with its 8 SPEs (Synergic Processing Elements) and one general purpose processing core is a much harder platform to work with, and being a new idea, we will have to wait to see how well this combination performs. On the other hand, the Xbox 360 is powered by three general purpose processing cores, which is very similar to having a regular computer with three processors installed (take a look at this article from Tom’s Hardware) is relatively easy to deal with when developing new code or when porting applications from other architectures, or platforms.

Think of having an Xbox 360 running Linux with three 500GB drives attached through USB 2.0 running in a software RAID 5 configuration, for a redundant 1TB of storage, protecting your network from all the evils on the internet, converting all those music tracks you have, compressing all that vacation footage for DVD burning, acting as a centralized repository for all those files you have, storing all those backup images of all your home boxes, acting as your home asterisk VOIP PBX, while folding all those proteins, all while playing that DVD you want to watch on your TV without dropping a single frame.

Some may argue that the Xbox 360 processor beast may be limited by its not so impressive 512MB of RAM, which is not upgradeable (at least not as far as I know), but I think this is more than compensated for by its blazing fast memory interface running at 700MHz DDR, delivering a stunning 22.4GB per second of data for the IBM CPU to work with. This fast memory interface reduces the impact of having a large cache on the CPU because it greatly reduces the penalty of a cache miss on the CPU.

Considering that Linux and Linux applications and services aren’t as memory intensive as Windows, 512MB may turn to be plenty of memory to work with. There are a lot of examples on the net of people running a hell lot of servers on an old box with 128MB or less RAM on an old 200MHz Pentium box, and never complaining of lack responsiveness.

If we look at the majority of applications and services that users run on their home computers such as media encoding, watching DVDs, listening to music, and others, they aren’t bound by the amount of RAM available, but rather by the speed of your storage sub-system, and the amount of processing power available. This is where the Xbox 360 shines. In theory, the three cores on the Xbox 360 processor can run up to 6 threads concurrently. At 3.2GHz per core, and factoring in how efficient the PowerPC architecture is, and you get an idea of how much stuff you could do with a hacked Xbox 360 running Linux.

So, what can the Xbox 360 do with Linux on board? A hell lot.