When Playstation 3 was first released, one of its most acclaimed features was the ability to officially run a full Linux distribution. Of course, Sony made a software update a few years later, which is a famous and permanent failure, probably because the price of the game console is too low to make a profit, and Sony does not want to indirectly fund the server farm made of relatively cheap hardware. Of course, such a decision to keep Linux away from computer systems will only encourage Linux users to put it on those same systems. Similarly, with the help of the notorious operating system, this project has turned a more modern Playstation 4 into a kubernetes cluster.
According to the modern desktop standard, the hardware of Playstation 4 is a little outdated, but if you know the unofficial and unsupported method of installing psxitarch Linux on a computer, its ability as a general-purpose computer is still very strong. This is an arch based distribution built specifically for PS4, but in order for it to run the docker image [zhekun Hu] wants to use, some patches need to be made to the kernel. With the help of Gentoo community, a customized kernel was finally compiled. After spending some time in the “Linux kernel option hell” described by [zhekun Hu], an available configuration was finally found.
The current cluster consists of two PS4 running the customized software and runs multiple services, including nginx, calico, Prometheus and grafana. For those who don’t use Playstation 4S, this may be an option to get them back to work, but it should also be a warning about the trouble of configuring the Linux kernel from scratch. However, as we have seen recently with 386 and floppy disks, it can still be done on almost any machine.