The AnandTech Linux XBOX PC Experiment
by Kristopher Kubicki on November 10, 2004 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Distributed Rendering
Consumer distributed computing first became vogue in the mid 90's. While the NSA was busy simulating nuclear blasts on big iron, thousands of off-the-shelf computers a day were happily rendering frames for graphic artists. Even as Donald Becker and Thomas Sterling were coining the phrase, "Beowulf Cluster", people at Pixar and Alias were already well experienced in render scheduling on expensive SGI machines, but almost immediately, people began toying with the idea of splitting render jobs over multiple Windows NT machines. The Windows NT render farms were really the first Beowulf clusters used for anything important, and not surprisingly, there happens to be a lot of distributed rendering software out there. The process of rendering - that is taking a raw 3D data file and then raytracing it to produce a high quality image or set of images - happens to be very distributed computing friendly. Early render farms were very basic; if 100 frames needed to be rendered and 10 machines had render software, the host machine simply sent 10 frames to each computer and waited for them to render. Today's software is much more advanced, and network latencies are low enough that the host renderer can apply components of a frame to several different computers at once.There is some really excellent software like Rush Render Queue that will enable us to use software like Mental Ray for multiplatform rendering. Apple's QMaster also has some great features for distributed rendering for Shake. Today, however, we are just looking at a free ray tracer, POV-Ray. Below, you can see how our configurations ran under various options of the SMPOV addon for POV-Ray.
This test fringes theoretical. Since there are no Linux SMP or multiprocessor versions of POV-Ray, we had to improvise. POV-Ray allows us to render only a component of a scene if we desire, so using NFS we setup a directory where all the XBOX nodes had access the benchmark.ini files. Each file was modified to only render a specific portion of the scene based on the machine host name, and then the benchmark was launched via our scripts. We went through the same process for our Opteron and Xeon machines, launching one render process per processor, effectively running the renderer in SMP mode.
If our Distributed Compiling test was any forewarning, we weren't surprised that the XBOX cluster had a very difficult time being very effective here. Let's hope that the cluster can hold up a little better under encryption algorithms.
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ukDave - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Yes the xbox has a PS1 emulator, only one that i know of. Its called "PCSXbox". Good place for emulator info: http://xport.xbox-scene.com/ , obviosuly a subsection of xbox-scene.And before anyone asks, no there are none for the PS2 (nor will there ever be).
ukDave - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
I'm not 100% sure about the SmartXX, as i have the well known Xecuter 2.3b chip which has DIP switches mountable on the outsode of the xbox so that youc an disable it in order to play X-Box live and whatnot.From what i've just read over on the forums at xbox-scene, SmartXX is fully X-BoX Live compliant. You simply (as you say Kris) boot back into the MS BIOS. This can be done by turning the xbox on by pressing the EJECT button. To enable the modchip, turn on with the POWER button. (source: http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=3...
SmartXX section of the forums: http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showforum=6...
ksherman - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
#3, you said there is mulators for n64 and down. Is there an emulator for PSone games? would love to be able to play FF7 againKristopherKubicki - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Jeff7181: I think with the SmartXX chip you can actually boot back into the normal MS BIOS and have no problems with X-Link and such. If you install Linux on the last 2 unpartitioned GB of your 10GB drive, your XBOX should basically have no idea that the machine is modded at all.LotoBak, ukDave, am I correct on that statement?
Kristopher
ukDave - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Oh and Jeff, i believe many mod chips have the facility to simply turn them off with a flick of a switch, so you can continue to use XBOX Live. But as LotoBak says, there is the free X-Link service available too.ukDave - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
http://www.xbox-scene.com is really the only place to go for XBOX related discussion, tutorials, really anything you need to know that isn't covered in this article.I bought a bodged XBOX mod from someone in the UK, got it professionally fixed and re-modded. It now has a 120GB disk for all my games, its connected to my LAN. With the excellent XBMC i can play literally any media file from any PC over the network, be it standard files such as MP3's or AVI's, or images such as .bins/cue's.
Well worth looking into if you have an XBOX that is currently un-modded.
Also, /me wants 8 XBOX's :D Although, those 'leccy costs, eek!
Jeff7181 - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
I've been thinking about modding mine to use to play video over the network... but I don't want to lose normal Xbox (and Xbox Live) functionality. Wish that was covered here, but I guess it's not really a "mod your Xbox" article as much as it's a "mod an Xbox to make a cheap PC" article.LotoBak - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Nice guys... besides your linking problemKnowing a little more about the xbox scene a few things your might consider...
1) Mods go for as cheap as 10USD retail.
2) Software exploiting the xbox is always an option which results in a 'free' modchip
3) http://tutorials.xbox-scene.com to learn about most anything
4) XBMC dvd menu support is comming!
5) XBMC irc channel on irc.efnet.info #xbmc
6) Online gaming is free through Xlink www.teamxlink.com
7) Emulators for n64 and 'down' are available
8) This is the cheapest htpc with 480p 720 and 1080i available
9) xbmc supports many formats
Audio : wav, aac, ac3, mp3, flac, ra, vorbis
Video : ogg avi mkv rm, mov containers
Codec : xivd, divx, mpeg2, mpeg1, quicktime, realvideo and realaudio (limited) and many others. The video engine is based apon mplayer open source project
Networking :
Shares :Supports ccx, samba (windows file sharing), and replaytv shares.
Streaming : Supports a multitude of video and audio streaming formats. webradio is included which has a 'channel' browser for online shoutcast streams. There is also a apple movie trailer browser.
Scripting :
XBMC has python scripting language implimented so its open to many possibilities
XBMC does have some rough edges but it is maturing quickly. If you are interested in contributing to the project check out www.xboxmediacenter.com and the 'XBMC' project on sourceforge
Feel free to ask questions about xbox stuff here... ill watch it for a while
Marlin1975 - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2271...Marlin1975 - Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - link
Page 6 has HOME instead of page 7 link