Turning my Playstation 2 into a home server

Inspired by the awesome Advanced Computer Architectures class that I took while on my exchange in Prague, which made me think of Playstation 2 hardware with its (in)famous vector units...

As a kid, I grew up watching my older brother clocking games like Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, and the Sly series—all classic games for the Playstation 2. Since we were only allowed one hour of screen time, I often missed out on my time to play because I was always in a trance watching my brother play and would forget to claim my hour of screen time, but I was also quite bad at the games so it was more fun watching someone good than it was fumbling around myself. Anyways a few years later around 2010, I remember my dad telling me about Linux for the PS2 as it came up in conversation when he was looking at getting a PS3 (which also had Linux for the earlier models). He also mentioned something about the U.S. military building a supercomputer cluster using PS3s around the same time, which apparently is true. Linux for the PS2 seemed like some sort of mythical entity that was utterly unobtainable (and it still is today of course, with listings going for hundreds of euros). Today, I am an adult and for the better or worse, in charge of my own financial situation. Consequently, this lead me to fulfill some childhood dreams and splash out a bit of money acquiring PS2 hardware in Germany.

Playstation 2 Hardware

Upon reading the title, you may be thinking: “Why would anyone even bother running a home server on compute hardware from 1999? Let alone a 27 year-old console?”" That is a good point and to that I say: “Good question.” I can only say that this project was just a curiosity that got the better of me due to childhood nostalgia.

The Emotion-Engine

The majority of processing prowess of the PS2 is located within the Emotion-Engine. The Emotion-Engine is comprised of several compute elements with the most important elements being the R5900 MIPS CPU core clocked at 294.912 MHz coupled alongside two so-called vector units. Interestingly, the RS5900 CPU core on its own is rather unremarkable. While out-of-order execution in CPUs was definitely mainstream by the year 2000, the R5900, being based on the R5000 from 1996, was firmly an in-order CPU and as I have learned recently in the awesome Advanced Computer Architectures class during my exchange in Prague, this leaves a lot of performance gains on the table.

SATA? IDE(K) her!

Keen readers familiar with the PS2 may have already realised that the Networking Interface Adapter that was supplied for the phat models of the PS2 only had an IDE interface for the HDD. The IDE interface poses a problem since it is ancient technology from the 90’s that nobody cares about these days and the fact that the technical limitations only allow for about 500 GB of storage, which was considered bleeding edge at the time, so such drives are not only rare, but extremely expensive. The solution to this problem? Yes! That’s correct, soldering a daughter board that converts the IDE to a SATA interface! With this, we can now use SATA HDDs that are much easier to come by. For instance, I picked up a 1TB SATA HDD for about 15 Euros where an equivalent 1TB IDE HDD would have set me back by around 250 Euros!

Putting it in numbers

Since the PS2 is effectively computing hardware from the year 1999, the idea of running anything performance critical is completely out of the question. In theory, the maximum transfer speeds should be around 100Mb per second (around ~12.5MB per second) but in reality, the real transfer speeds end up being something like 4MB per second.

Finding Playstation 2 Linux

PS2 Linux is essentially unobtanium so we will have to look at other flavours of operating systems compatible with the PS2. BlackRhino is a known popular alternative with decent package support for the PS2.

Playstation 2 Homebrew

The reason this silly idea of mine is even possible, is thanks in large to the homebrew community of the PS2. Tireless efforts of PS2 enthusiasts have led to the full hacking of the Playstation 2 system security. At the time of this writing, the last major security block implemented by Sony was cracked with the technical details written up on this lovely blog here.