Xbox360 Linux Loader already in the works!

[Raven]

Could be a breakthrough here:

Originally Posted by qj.net

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If a Linux-PPC developers' mailing list is anything to go by, we might soon be looking at Linux running on our beloved Xbox360. This big news comes after other huge developments in the last fortnight or so...

First, we had the hypervisor vulnerability, which led to the first Proof of Concept Hello World homebrew code, after which we had news of a MAME emulator in the works (which should hopefully work on retail hacked 360s), and now we have news that people have been busy writing patches to get the Xbox360 to run Linux. Here's the announcement in the mailing list:

This series of patches add support for the Xbox 360 gaming console.

Note that these patches were written by different people, who want to remain anonymous. These drivers were written without hardware documentation being available.

There are probably more than some rough edges. Please comment and/or provide patches.

To actually run this, you need a special loader which exploits the recently announced vulnerability. This loader was developed seperately and should be available soon.

thanks,
Felix


Now if you're wondering if this might be fake, don't worry... Felix Domke has been in the news in the past not only in the GameCube homebrew scene, but a quick Google Search for his name shows many credible pages about him.

As for details about the patch, it is built against the Linux 2.6.20 Linux PPC kernel which has been running flawlessly on PS3 Linux distros as well. As noted previously, your Xbox360's kernel version will have to be one of the affected ones, namely, 4532 or 4548. For people having the newest kernel (4552), there doesn't seem to be a solution in sight since downgrading is currently not possible by even an external flasher.

This news, after the earlier huge announcements, shows that the homebrew/hacking scene is starting to get on a roll. We can only hope that it keeps going like this for some time to come. Stay tuned for the latest updates!