ucLinux Port to the PSP

[wraggster]

Freedom Fry has announced his port of ucLinux to the PSP.

From the original Post:
This is a Release for all the non believers and elitist "hackers" in the "scene". After some weeks of hacking i made it. Yet another time the REAL breakthrough stuff comes from FRANCE!!!

WARNING: It doesnt do anything useful yet. It also runs in kernel mode which means incase of a malfunction anything could happen including bricking your PSP (although very unlikely, i have run it a hundred times during development).

I will release the source (or maybe only patches) in the next days. Give me some time to recover first.

More info

A tiny Bootloader made with the opensource PSPSDK is used to initialize the Memory and a little bit of the Hardware. It decompresses the ucLinux kernel into Userspace and runs it. Currently it relies on the Display Hardware beeing initialized by the PSP Operating system (and PSPSDK) to make the Framebuffer Console work. As you can see from the dmesg, this is also pretty much the only thing that works at all.

Screenshots and Download Via Comments

EDIT by DraconumPB: Beware of this software until it is fully tested! A version of this runs on iPod as well, but I have in the past bricked a first-gen iPod by installing this (it did run but eventually caused an endless boot-loader loop). As stated it runs in kernel mode and therefore can really mess with your PSP and cause damage to your PSP that can't be repaired. However, this is still an excellent effort towards linux running and operating on PSP without emulation!

[The_Ultimate_Eggman]

WOW !!!! could this be the building blocks to a linux based OS on the PSP I hope so Fkin awesome work guyz !!! Plz like linux make the source available.I know u will !!

[bullhead]

I know im saying something that sounds stupid but, What is this? What is uclinux? Thanks.

[sroon]

So does this run on the PSP or do you make stuff on you computer, then put it on your PSP?

[pepegomez]

linux is a os based on unix. a kernelaccesthing. i dunno much about that...
but its an os like windows but more comfortable for pros

[kyle2194]

Yep, and uclinux is the type of linux that runs on my ipod also! I wonder if podzilla runs on my psp.

[idapimp]

linux kicks ass. this is a cool developement. maybe it'll lead up to someone porting say maybe...gentoo, debian, or redhat... i'd be in heaven

[Apoklepz]

KICK ASS!!! Oops can I say that here?

[Cooe14]

That's pretty cool but i think someone should try and get BII running better instead. I would prefer mac os 8 over linux and BII already runs the full os just not that well. Is this form of linux text based because that's what it looks like from the screenshots?

[dcmain]

Oh, first post.

MacOS may be more user friendly, but your comment implies you havn't used Linux much! Basically, linux has a massive number of open source programs that can be made (often with no modification) to compile on any different version of linux you may be using. By version, I mean whatever platform you might be using it on. Linux can run on the old PowerPC mac processors, Intel and AMD x86 chips, and just about every single other chipset used in the last 10 years.

The point of using linux over a different os is that it can be adapted to almost any purpose, and a really psp-oriented gui could fairly easily be constructed to fit this version of linux for the psp!

It would be great to get BII working better, because any development for the psp is cool, but linux is a massive, massive thing to get working - it opens up so much other stuff.


All versions of linux are sortof textbased, underneath, but on top of that you get all the good stuff.

UCLinux is a special type that doesn't require a certain chip on the motherboard, I think it's called a real-time clock, or something... Anyway, normal linux kernels do need one, UClinux doesn't, so it's more easily ported to portable devices (like the iPod!).

Phew. I'm going to bed.

Oh, and podzilla probably wouldn't work very well, it's integrated quite tightly into ipod linux, isn't it? it probably uses all sorts of iPod specific hardware things. However, if you really, really wanted, you could get the source and slice all the ipod bits out and compile it. Good luck with that .
In theory, any linux app could be adapted to work (and work well, not like an emulated version of windows!) on the psp, if linux would work in the first place.

Dom