Full Linux-on-PS4 hits Github

Ever since fail0verflow first told Chaos Computer Club Sony PS4 machines could be persuaded to run Linux, a fair amount of work has gone into replicating his demonstration.

The problem for other PS4 hackers: to avoid take-downs and other sueballs from Sony, fail0verflow published only a Linux-to-PS4 port, leaving the rest of the world to discover the specific exploit used.

That unleashed a widespread effort, not only to find the best exploit, but to turn it into something stable.

According to this piece at Wololo.net, Githubber kR105 has laid hands on the grail.

The information comes with no warranty from The Register, because Vulture South doesn't have a spare PS4 with firmware version 1.76 handy to experiment on.

However, this, Wololo writes, is not a demonstration video, it's a “fully operational dlclose exploit” (referring to the Webkit exploit widely believed to lie behind fail0ver's original disclosure).

The piece continues: “there were still issues on how the publicly available code was working, crashing as soon as the exploit was attempting to return to userland. kR105’s release fixes all of that, it includes root, sandbox escape and jailbreak”.

With the files provided by kR105, the PS4-1.76 will boot from its USB (the kernel image, bzImage, and the initial file system, initramfs.cpio.gz.

The kR105 readme continues: “From there you can setup the environment to run from an NFS share or from an external drive via USB (recommended) and boot a complete distro!”. ®