Modder helps Sony unwittingly beat Valve to the punch: 'I ported Linux to the PS5 and turned it into a Steam Machine'
If you've ever looked at a PlayStation 5 and thought 'That would be a really good budget gaming PC, if only you could put your own operating system on it', then I have good news for you. Because that's precisely what one software engineer has managed to do, though the simplicity of the outcome belies the seriousness of the challenge.
The engineer in question, Andy Nguyen, posted their success story on X (via TechSpot), reporting that his Ubuntu-powered PS5 Slim happily runs GTA 5 Enhanced, with ray tracing enabled. Now, it's worth noting that Sony already uses Linux for its own PlayStation operating system, but that doesn't mean the project was anything simple.
That's because Sony locks everything right down, and the old PS2/PS3 days of slapping Linux onto a console with a disc are long gone. Nguyen first had to use a known exploit to bypass Sony's barriers, which only works for older versions of the PS5's firmware. But just getting access is only part of the solution, because you then need drivers for everything, and Sony's hardly going to just hand those over.
When it comes to the PS5's GPU, a heavily customised RDNA 1/2 unit, you'd be forgiven for thinking that there's no way around that thorny problem. Rescue came in the form of open-source Mesa, which can apparently be very easily tweaked to support the custom GPU.
Other than Nguyen's PS5 Slim struggling to run at full pelt due to thermal problems, the Linuxified console appears to run GTA 5 Enhanced pretty well. Audio output is present, controller support seems fine, and even the USB ports are apparently all fine and dandy. In short, it's a proper gaming PC.
Now, before you run off and start trying the same thing on your own PS5, do note that none of this is simple to do. Take the exploit hack that's required: if you regularly update your console, then you're out of luck, as the firmware will have been upgraded to remove the access.
And if you watch the video in Nguyen's post carefully, you'll see that the Steam performance overlay has…err…problems with recognising a few things correctly, such as GPU clock speeds, utilisation, VRAM levels, and somewhat importantly, temperatures (somehow I don't think that the chip really is running at -2147483 degrees Celsius).
But if one person has succeeded, others will surely follow, and that makes me wonder just how long it will be before we start seeing a very odd AMD GPU cropping up in the Steam Hardware Survey. Probably sooner than we see any real Steam Machines, that's for sure.