The Sony Playstation 4 gaming console which has been released on 15th of November in United States, uses the FreeBSD kernel. This is not official yet, but a user has been posted a screenshot on reddit under the title “PS4 runs FreeBSD Kernel”.
The image shown below displays a list of installed software, you can see clearly the FreeBSD Kernel. The FreeBSD kernel is a modular open source kernel developed by The FreeBSD Project. It is supported by the following platforms:
– IA-32
– x86-64
– SPARC64
– IA-64
– PowerPC
– ARM
– MIPS
Unfortunately since they can take the kernel and can do everything with it we can’t say they are keeping open source technologies for their platforms, they are just using it for their own benefits.
The fact that FreeBSD is more liberal in licensing than Linux tell us the reason why Sony chose The FreeBSD kernel over Linux. The FreeBSD kernel has problems too, it currently lacks manufacturer supported full-feature AMD graphics drive so I believe that Sony and AMD have thought about a nice and effective solution.
The operating system running on Playstation 4 is Orbis OS, it is a spin of FreeBSD 9.0.
