The AnandTech Linux XBOX PC Experiment
by Kristopher Kubicki on November 10, 2004 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Final Thoughts
Turning the XBOX into a slow desktop or a limited Media Center had its advantages. The XBOX seems fast enough to do some everyday computing like email and web, although we wouldn't recommend using the bundled Xebian distribution over a local install. The XBMC software package looks like an excellent work in progress that we ended up spending more attention on than we originally anticipated. The ability to play back DiVX movies from a network fileserver or just bring up the weather instantly really made us wish MythTV had such degree of control over the network. Of course, XBMC does not utilize PVR functionality. Hopefully, some of the excellent work from XBMC ends up in projects like MythTV and Freevo for non-XBOX folks as well.After several days of configuration and set up, we finally got our cluster up and running. Costs of the cluster were a little higher than we had originally anticipated; we bought a hard drive blaster, a switch and various cabling, duct tape and shelving. Other costs added another $150 to the price of eight XBOXes ($1200) and mod chips ($480). The total cost of the cluster as configured in the article came out to $1830 - the cost of two Opteron 250s and a very poor dual socket motherboard. Unfortunately, we might have expected too much of our XBOX cluster. The saying goes, "Many hands make light work." The addendum should read: "unless the hands are actually four-year-old stripped down processors made for Microsoft." Probably, had we tried this experiment in early 2002 instead of late 2004, we would have had more shocking results. Cracking keys on the distributed XBOXes showed a lot of promise fortunately, particularly if we can get the network to scale high enough. Other projects that require constant CPU operation like folding@home and seti@home would be the best use for such a cluster; just remember the $1400 electricty bill per year for a 16-node cluster.
The ability to add more memory to our XBOX would have significantly boosted performance in render and compile operations. Since encryption/hashing relying mainly on computing power alone, our XBOX might be out of luck there - granted our cluster performed the best under this test. VIA's EPIA platform has small hardware optimizations for many encryption algorithms, which we would probably see much better performance there in a different analysis. We saw in this analysis that while the XBOX does alright in some benchmarks, it's only advantages are price and footprint. Building an equivalent cluster on other ~$200 PCs (that can be upgrated none-the-less) would theoretically yield far better performance. Expect a low-cost DIY Linux cluster guide from us in the future.
As far as clustering goes, we can do some pretty similar things with VIA's EPIA platform as well, and that will probably be the focus of a different distributed Linux project. VIA's 1000MHz Nehemiah platforms run for about $150 without memory, case or hard drive, although you can still find some of the older 800MHz EPIAs for about $100. However, XBOX has the advantage of a readily available and extremely standardized setup. Finding a chassis combination for the EPIA platform that serves a render farm correctly might be a little harder for a VIA based approach, but we will leave that for a different article. We also would like to setup a similar cluster with PlayStation 2 consoles, but that may be another article as well.
Setting up a cluster has its advantages, provided you can utilize programs that will correctly take advantage of as must computing power as possible. Even though an XBOX cluster will scale very quickly for a relatively low price, lacking the ability to upgrade CPU and memory really drag our performance down. The amount of computing power that we demonstrated today on the eight-node cluster only resides in a 3' by 2' by 2' volume, which is excellent for an eight-node Linux cluster. The practicality of our cluster turned out to be fairly negligible; had we seen some really outstanding performance, we probably would have been able to justify the hours of work and configuration. Perhaps NetBSD or Linux will get an early jump on XBOX 2 so that we can try out our next attempt to run Linux on Microsoft hardware a little earlier in the game.
Special thanks to BMMods for providing us review samples for this article.
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Nepsir - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
I was just wondering if you will do a test with mental ray on the cluster (I think you mentioned something about Mental Ray in the article). It would be really interesting to see the results of that since me and a couple of friends got modded X-Boxes and I have a 3dsMax6 license (Mental Ray is included).gibson042 - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
You might want to look at the "mini-cluster" project (http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/) when planning/designing/building your EPIA cluster. It's a 12-node (originally 6) cluster developed by Glen Gardner, and appears to be the same size or a little smaller than a stack of an equal number of XBOXes. Of course, the frame is custom built and the hardware is exposed to the world.Aikouka - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
I can say that I love having a modded xbox, because the capabilities are so much greater. As discussed earlier, a software mod can be a great way to do it (although it usually requires a game unless you want to take your HDD out, which is NOT a fun method unless you love swapping IDE cables.)It's also good to note that you should be careful when modding these or even make a backup of the hdd on your system, because things can go wrong, and if you like to fiddle with things, then your chances will be a lot higher. I know at one point I was stuck in error 16 and had to pull the HDD out and unlock it using the IDE swap method.
Are there plans for an article on modding something such as the PS2? I just recently tried a no-solder modchip in the PS2, and it doesn't seem to be going along too well. Maybe it's time for a flip-top.
Scarceas - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
"We crimped our own cabling as you can see in the image below."I'm still looking for the image, I know its there somewhere!
bleugh - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
If anyone wants their xbox motherboards upgraded to 128 megabytes of memory, I can do itI'm UK based and use BRAND NEW samsung memory chips
I can upgrade your existing motherboards, sell you ready upgraded boards, or even just the chips!
if one of the anandtech team wants their xboxes upgraded i'll happily do it at cost, please contact me to discuss
Dean
LotoBak - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
First, XBox live banning....Basically this is how it used to work. When your on live it does a hash of your bios. A mod replaces your bios. If you bios is not the retail ms bios the serial (eeprom) is blacklisted. NOW since halo2 has been released it appears that MS has changed a while bunch of shit on us. Preliminary information indicates that MS is banning by hard drive serial+model numbers, xbox serial, and flagging the gamertag as 'potential pirate'. Thus to unban the xbox both a new hdd and eeprom are needed. Then you must cancel and create a new xbox live account. There are more details about how it all works but bottom line is we dont know how it works now. They can throw new stuff at us anytime now. Rumors are flying that hdd capacities are being scanned as well. For all intents and perposes xbox + modded xbox's do not mix.
Yes there is a PS1 emu for xbox. That said xbox DVD drives do not read cd-r (or retail ps1 games) Therefor all games must be transfered to the xbox hdd in bin/cue or iso format
When comparing mods remember, the mod contains no modded bios stuff. They are useless in them selves. You will need to aquire a modded bios for your xbox (online, free). What this means is that every mod can contain the same bios's. Therefor they all contain the same base features (mostly booting unsigned code). Hardware features and support is where you want to base your decision on. If you want cheap + no manufacterer support there are 10$ solutions around for you(enabled/disables with power button). If you want support with a mod with a few extra hardware features (2 bios's, external switch) that'll cost around 30-40. Fancy Shamcy lcd support, 8 bios banks, blah blah blah fancy external thing thoes are up to 75ish. But in the end they all allow you to run the same software on the xbox.
if you want to learn read some beginner tutorials at http://tutorials.xbox-scene.com
Omega215D - Thursday, November 11, 2004 - link
After seeing Halo 2, it makes me wonder if they really need Pixel Shader 2.0. Its pretty cool that I can play old games on the XBOx through emulators though but i wanna see when the next XBOX kicks off before spending $200.ViRGE - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
#12, probably not. The Xbox's GPU is a GeForce 4 class GPU - the lack of Pixel Shader 2.0 features can really be limiting.euph - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
is there any way to use the gpu for the pov-ray rendering?ukDave - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Little quote that sums up the SmartXX XBL saga:Q: just bought a Smart XX mod and I still don't know if i'll be able to play xbox live so please somebody tell me if i'll be able to play it.
A: There is no easy way to answer this question. First of all, it all depends on circumstance. Have you upgraded your hard drive? Has your Xbox ever been banned before? And, for newbs, are you thinking about playing on live while using a bios from the chip.
If you answered yes to any of these questions you've won a lifetime ban from Microsoft!
Sleep time :) And i don't even use XBL :D