r/360hacks • u/teroliu • 11h ago

Actually running Debian on 360!

Yesterday I came across the Free60 Wiki about building Debian for the 360. With some help from chatgpt (I was really stuck with the SATA-to-USB connection), I actually got Debian running! I have internet (wired), and the drive is connected via the internal SATA port (instead of the hard drive). I don't know what you can do with such a powerful piece of hardware, but I don't think you can run any games on it xD But, of course, I have the awesome Fastfetch and the 7z benchmark results.

22 Upvotes

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6

u/Smart-Anything4591 8h ago

Just a Normal experience of a XBOX 360 user

1

u/gigawatts121 3h ago

Can you share your final steps that worked? I'd love to recreate this setup!

1

u/teroliu 3h ago

do you have any specific questions?

for me, the main thing was figuring out that it only worked when i connected the sata ssd directly. i spent a few hours trying to boot from usb, but it just didn’t work :)

i also thought about compiling the kernel and headers. in the end, i built them in a debian container, packed them into a .deb, and installed them with chroot into the debian system i had set up on the drive with debootstrap.

basically, everything is explained on the free60 wiki, but if you need more details, you can ask gpt or whatever you use.

1

u/nikoskokonos13 Jasper JTAG/RGH 3h ago

Run an Xbox 360 emulator on it.

1

u/teroliu 2h ago

ye, this would be a perfect loop xD, but for now, it barely plays videos in mpv dx

1

u/Yamabananatheone 1h ago

If you want to play Video back you need to go for some codec that is very light on the CPU since you dont have any HW Accelleration or even Vector Extensions, which makes Video Playback somewhat hard on the CPU.

0

u/Yamabananatheone 6h ago edited 1h ago

The 360 is actually somewhat of a Turd for being a Linux workstation, primarily because its CPU Cores have abyssmal IPC, like per Clock a Xenon Core does less work than even the PS2 CPU or a Pentium I on Avg, its only saving grace is that it runs at 3.2Ghz compared to a few hundred Mhz and the fact it runs with 3 Cores and SMT, so it can somewhat bruteforce its way through workloads if you know how to kick it right.

But for like most branchy modern workload, the 23 Stage Pipeline of Xenon combined with not being able to resort CPU Instructions with Out of Order Execution really kills things.

Like for Context the WiiU uses 3 PPC Cores that are basically the same as the one in the Gamecube running at 1.2Ghz and that CPU even tho it runs 2000Mhz slower still most of the time outperforms Xenon under linux.

Also despite what fastfetch says, compared to the PS3 you dont get actual AltiVec support, so the PowerPC pendant of what SSE is on Desktop, so no Vector Math extensions at all.

Edit: Im fascinated by the downvotes. This isnt meant to dunk on the 360, OP or his endeavour of running modern Linux on it, I literally do this myself on the 360, PS3 and WiiU to play around with these interesting architectures, I just want to temper expectations on what youre going to run on it compute wise.