AMD and FreeBSD Begin Collaborating over OS Improvements | Hacker News Reader

AMD and FreeBSD Begin Collaborating over OS Improvements

phoronix.com

74 pointsBSDobelix17 comments

> This work will allow FreeBSD to fully support greater than 256 cores with features such as CPU mapping and will also include bhyve integration.

This is the improvement the article talks about. So it's unrelated to the current AI/GPU hype.

This seems like good news. Does anyone know more about AMD’s incentives for participating in this collaboration? What’s in it for them? (Given that a large majority of their customers run either Linux or Windows.)

Maybe making Microsoft happy as well? FreeBSD is collaborating with Microsoft on Azure support.

It's always good to have a second Unix'y option. Also good for customers like Netflix and companies that can't or won't use the GPL like Sony.

The PS4 ran a modified freebsd on amd hardware. I'd guess games console related in some way.

Game consoles with more than 256 cores??

Cloud gaming perhaps

I’d guess Sony using FreeBSD and AMD in PlayStation would be a big part of it. That partnership is worth billions

> AMD sold Sony some $3.776 billion worth of chips for PlayStation 5 game consoles in 2022, which accounted for 16% of the company's revenue for the year

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sony-becomes-largest-custo...

Notably Netflix video platform is both AMD and FreeBSD. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other similar big enough customers that throwing some spare change in FreeBSDs direction is worthwhile

> Serving Netflix Video Traffic at 800Gb/s and Beyond [pdf] (nabstreamingsummit.com)

> 590 points by ksec on Aug 19, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 394 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32519881

While consoles are sizeable chunk for AMD, I don't think stuff like >256 core support or bhyve is exactly relevant for gaming.

>bhyve is exactly relevant for gaming

Virtualization is absolutely relevant for game consoles, I think the Xbox runs 3 VM's inside (for DRM reasons). And I think Playstation does too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ps5homebrew/comments/oy60ht/do_ps5_...

Xbox uses Hyper-V on Windows. bhyve support is meaningless.

What about the PlayStation OS, which is reportedly based on FreeBSD?

I don’t know what the PS OS uses under the hood.

At least you wrote something...

"throwing some spare change in FreeBSDs direction is worthwhile"

But that could only last for one year maximum. Because Netflix cancels anything good after a year.

Ah, FreeBSD always felt a little more smooth in subtle ways on Intel hardware. Hopefully that will change now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com