PS3 Downgrade 4.40 - Downgrading latest PS3 Firmware

Fast forward to 2006 and with the PS2 having reached its plateau of mainstream popularity Sony announce the PS3 to a eager market. Once again the specs were breathtaking with the inclusion of a RSX graphics controller and the new Cell processor from IBM capable of some serious number crunching.

Of course by now there was a well established community of PS2 Linux users so Sony were quick once again to market the Linux capabilities of the PS3 with the inclusion of the OtherOS feature. This was quickly followed after the consoles release with YellowDog Linux tailored for the PS3.. By now Sony wasn't just marketing the PS3 as a games console. Under the "It only does everything!" banner the console was marketed as a home computer capable of running 'other operating systems', a media center PC with built in BluRay player which ALSO played games.

This is quite a big distinction and it allowed Sony to pay a lesser tax rate on imports by having it classified as a computer rather than a games console.

For the average home Linux user interested in homebrew there was a problem though. When Sony included the otherOS feature in their console they had limited it!. They had restricted access to the RSX graphics driver so anything that used graphics had to rely completely on the cell processor which was also limited in the number of cores available. What this actually meant in real terms is that anything that ran perfectly well on a PS2 in 60 frames a seconds would craw and stutter along at 10 FPS if you were lucky. You suddenly had the unlikely outcome of a high specification console such as the PS3 unable to run even a simpled SNES emulator at full speed!

Once of the first surprise buyers of the PS3 for its Linux capabilities was the US Military. They realized very early on that by linking multiple Linux running PS3's together they could assemble a super computer of cell processors at a budget price. Just how many they did buy is anybody's guess but they have a lot of money backing them so it could be a very very scary number! Its worth remembering at this point that as with most new generation game consoles that are released, the first models are generally sold at a loss on the hardware with the follow up Software purchases actually making the money. So this was no doubt a painful thorn in Sony's side.

With it now obvious that native Linux on the PS3 was a dead end unless like the Military and Scientific Institutions you were just interested in straight number crunching step forward the iPhone hacker and general media flirt George Hotz aka GeoHot. He started poking around inside the PS3 looking for a way to have unlimited access to the hardware via Linux. This meant trying to circumvent the Hypervisor, the chip responsible for locking access to specific parts of the system memory. In his "Hello Hypervisor, I'm Geohot" blog post Mr Hotz announced to the world that he had access to the Hypervisor and full control would soon be available to Linux. Although these initial claims seemed to be a bit premature and he disappeared off the Scene for a few months after this claiming to have stopped working on the PS3 to spend time on other projects others were looking at that various security layers of the PS3 hardware.

During the 27C3 Conference held in late December 2010, Wii Hackers Fail0verflow detailed the failings in the security of the PS3 that allowed them to reverse engineer the Private Public Keys from the console and released the tools necessary to do it. Within 24 hours GeoHot resurfaced with the first Hello World for the PS3 which was shortly followed by his now famous Jailbreak for it. While this now meant that Linux could now be installed to the PS3 and run unhindered by the Hypervisor it also broke the security of the console wide open which as is usual with this kind of release lets in the pirates. While Geohot claimed his jailbreak did not enable piracy on the console it was in fact possible if you were willing to jump though a few hoops to get your games to run and regardless this method was itself reverse engineered and a fully piracy enabled firmware aka CFW was soon released. Flooding the Playstation Network with people playing backed up and in some cases modified games allowing cheating. While initially Sony themselves made a few small public announcements regarding the situation their ultimate response was to be catastrophic for any Linux users.

Leaving aside the expected arrest and subsequent court appearances for Geohot and the Fail0verflow team and the general internet s**t storm that followed. The death toll for Linux on the PS3 sounded on the 28th March 2011 with the announcement of firmware update 3.21 to be released on April 1st.. What many originally perceived to be a very poor taste April Fools joke turned out to be indeed true. With the update Sony would be disabling the OtherOS feature permanently. Stating that anyone who bought their PS3 for the intention of running Linux on it was free to carry on doing so by not updating the console. While initially this would not matter for anyone just number crunching with PS3 clusters it effectivly killed off access for any hobbyists as new games would require an update. Sony seemingly to have wiped their PS2 history at the same time were now classing hobbyists,hackers and pirates all together now as the enemy. When they should really just be worrying about the real Pirates. Just Googling TruBlu for PS3 shows that eventually Pirates still find a way.

So you had a choice. Keep your PS3 as a slow Linux Computer and forget any new games or indeed BluRay films that come out or update and just have Games and BluRay. Not much of a choice really for the average user. The "It Only does Everything" slogan now seeming a bit stretched.

Is this the first time that an electronics manufacturer reached out into the living rooms and bedrooms of people who bought their product and took away something they paid for? Maybe but as the many class action lawsuits that were mounted against Sony over the removal of OtherOS were eventually all overturned in the courts it probably wont be the last time. This is definitely something any consumer not just Gamers should be aware of when purchasing their next new 3D Television as most now are internet enabled and starting out on the downloadable road. What will happen when some spotty hacker 'jailbreaks' your nice new television in the future?

So what the future? Indeed most of the more dedicated Linux users and of course anyone running a PS3 Cluster Super Computer did not update and are still on firmware 3.21. While the PS3 original firmware is now up to 4.00 any new PS3's bought now would at least be on firmware 3.56 meaning OtherOS can not be used on them. As is well documented (see PS3 Yellow Light of Dead or YLOD) hardware fails over time and replacing the PS3 in a cluster will get harder and harder and these old units die out.

The only other answer is the downgrading of PS3 firmware from the current to 3.21 to regain OtherOS. While at the moment this is only achievable through a hardware modification that requires quite advanced soldering skills a solder-less solution is not that far away. Once that is ready maybe the PS3 Linux community will be able to rise from its grave and enjoy Linux under 'AsbestOS' which a fully featured RSX graphics driver. That solution will hopefully come from the direction of the PS3 Downgrade 4.40 enabling the downgrading of the latest firmware 4.40 by Sony. At the time of writing this is problematic at best bust still a possibility for a new way to Downgrade a PS3.