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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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
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