PlayStation scene developer bigboss (psxdev) points out that basic PS5 support has been added to the popular LLVM Toolchain. This could pave the way to an open source toolchain/SDK for the PS5 scene.
What is LLVM
LLVM is a set of compiler and toolchain technologies, which can be used to develop a front end for any programming language and a back end for any instruction set architecture. LLVM is designed around a language-independent intermediate representation (IR) that serves as a portable, high-level assembly language that can be optimized with a variety of transformations over multiple passes
One of the most popular components of LLVM is probably clang, a C/C++ compiler.
What’s going on with PS4/PS5 and LLVM?
PlayStation have been using LLVM for the PS4 and the PS5, and have regularly brought back some of their console’s specific patches to the LLVM project. It’s likely this helps reduce maintenance load on their end (to avoid having to apply patches constantly on their own fork of the toolchain), and is probably also a way to give back to the open source community.
It’s unclear to us if they are legally required to push those patches to LLVM, as the LLVM license is known to be quite permissive, but Bigboss seems to imply he has been asking Sony for these patches to be brought for a while now, as early as July last year.
The recent patch that adds “Basic PS5 driver behavior” was committed by Paul Robinson of PlayStation, a week ago.
The added PS5 support so far is only a series of minor patches, exclusively within the clang compiler, to add support for the PS5 and its prospero SDK. Last week’s change only seems to add minimal support, in particular mostly merging PS4 specific functions into a more generic, “PS” naming convention, for code that is shared between the PS5 and PS4. More preparatory PS5 changes had been added to LLVM over the past few weeks (here, and here)
Could this lead to an open source PS5 SDK?
The toolchain in itself is of course not a PS5 SDK, but it’s a critical component to compiling binaries for the PS5. Bigboss sees it as a potential starting point for an open source (homebrew) PS5 SDK, to which Retroarch developer fjtrujy has made a tongue in cheek “challenge accepted” reply.
We’re of course very far from a possibility to develop homebrew for the PS5, with no PS5 jailbreak in sight.
Source: via psxdev and wololo.net