Valve working on 'Steam Box' gaming console with hardware partners

Re:Valve working on 'Steam Box' gaming console with hardware... by bryanlarsen on Saturday March 03, 2012 @07:15AM (#3660009)

I doubt that there is much benefit in using a "hypervisor" than just using Linux. On the PS3 with its 256MB of RAM and its 20GB hard drive, ~10 megabytes of RAM for kernel + core libraries and ~5 gigabytes of hard drive is a lot just for the operating system. On a modern machine that's just noise.

As for CPU usage, a properly tuned Linux kernel with unneeded services turned off shouldn't be significantly different from a hypervisor once it's booted.

Valve may try and set things up so that X11 is optional but even that should get mostly out of the way if you use the right libraries. (DRI etc.)

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Re:Valve working on 'Steam Box' gaming console with hardware... by Arelius on Saturday March 03, 2012 @02:58PM (#3660954)

But there is benefit in not using Linux. Most notably from a business standpoint (GPL). And benefits from not using most of the existing infrastructure (I highly suspect that X11 would be wholly excluded,mrather than just optional.)

I'm not trying to suggest that they will use a hypervisor, but rather suggest that they have a ton more options then seem to be listed here.

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