Psxitarch v3 for PS4 with Mesa 22.2.0-devel and new applications by PS3ITA: PS4 Distro Release

Psxitarch v3 for PS4 with Mesa 22.2.0-devel also comes with Vulkan config app (ACO, LLVM), LED colour changer, TearFree configuration script and more.

Back in November, thanks to the donations made by scene devs – zecoxao, eeply and a few other generous donors including Z3RO, flavio, jesus, etc., the veteran team, PS3ITA sprung back into action. PS3ITA Team, through their Twitter handle had announced the intention to work on Psxitarch v3. And, now, they have released Psxitarch v3 for PS4 with Mesa 22.2.0-devel and a bunch of useful scripts. We will talk about the new features, applications and more on the lightweight Psxitarch v3 for PS4 in a minute.

Psxitarch v3 for PS4: Video Review – Gaming performance, new apps, etc.

Psxitarch v3 for PS4: features

I am going to quickly list all the features that Psxitarch v3 brings, thanks to the detailed article by none other than the PS3ITA team itself.

  • Mesa 22.2.0_devel (Credits – Zerobou, who worked relentlessly to find the PS4 Pro patch to work with Mesa. His work can be found on our forum post)
  • Windows Manager: JWM
  • <370MB RAM usage when idle
  • Application menu dynamically updates upon installing or removing an application.
  • Time updated automatically upon connecting to network.
  • Screenshot with ALT+F6 (saved to ~/Screenshot).
  • Updated initramfs.cpio.gz which now will correctly aligns partitions (Credits – hippie68).
  • Automatic login.
  • New keyboard shortcuts to enable video signal – ALT + F11 followed by ALT + F12. Else, ALT + F1 followed by ALT + F2.
  • More

Psxitarch v3 for PS4: New Apps and scripts

  • LED Color – Lets user change colour of the PS4 LED. while booting and running PS4 Linux
  • Vulkan config – Switch from Vulkan (ACO) to Vulkan (LLVM) on the fly.
  • Ps4fancontrol – Integrated into distro and starts automatically on every boot. Learn how you can install and setup ps4fancontrol to start automatically on any PS4 Linux distro.
  • Xorg Keyboard Layout – Lets user set system language easily.
  • Script to mount user partition of PS4’s internal HDD (if kernel supports is available) – Do not use, if you don’t know what it means.
  • Script to enable and disable the desktop.
  • TearFree Configuration script – For those wondering what TearFree is, to put it simply, it reduces the screen tearing in gaming, without compromising on the FPS. It allows refreshing frame buffer without any FPS cap, that enables the display to show the most recent frame without waiting for the GPU/APU to refresh. For those interested, you can check out the detailed article on frame pacing and fixes.
  • send_icc_cmd – This is exclusively for the expert users, who know what an icc cmd is capable of. You can make a device node to control the icc on PS4 by running the command – sudo mknod -m 0666 /dev/icc c 0x49 1. Again, do this only if you know what you are doing. You can find a bit more information about this here.

Psxitarch v3 for PS4: Included applications/emulators

  • Duckstation
  • Dolphin Emulator (Gamecube, Wii)
  • Mupen64 Plus (Nintendo 64)
  • PPSSPP
  • Retroarch
  • Steam (Save RAM by going to View > Small Mode. Then, close Steam. Launch the application – Steam (No Browser) from the Application Menu.
  • Cemu (Wii-U)
  • Wine
  • Others

Download Psxitarch v3 for PS4

Download Psxitarch v3

Psxitarch v3 for PS4: Installation tutorial

It can be installed using the PS4 and the initramfs. Or, you could opt for the alternate and faster installation method.

Just to give you a quick recap, here are the steps recommended by PS3ITA team for the installation.

Step 1. Preparing USB Drive

  1. Format the USB drive using FAT32 Format. To do that, start the program FAT32 Format, select your drive letter properly and click Start.
    Note: This will wipe the USB drive completely.
  2. Copy bzImage, intramfs.cpio.gz and psxitarch.tar.gz to the root of the USB drive that you just formatted.

Step 2. Installing Psxitarch v3 on PS4 with Rescueshell

  1. Connect USB drive in a port and in the other connect the hub with keyboard and mouse.
  2. You will then have to jailbreak your PS4 and run the Linux Payload. Find the steps for loading Linux payload here. If you are on PS4 Pro, use the new performance doubling Linux payloads for PS4 Pro. I have already hosted them on jb.ps4linux.com. You could access them there too. Make sure that during the first run or installation, you are loading 1GB VRAM payload.
  3. If the payload loads successfully, the PS4 will drop into a rescueshell. With your keyboard, type exec install-psxitarch.sh and press Enter. The program will install the distro on your USB device. This will take time.
  4. After the process has completed, Psxitarch v3 will load. If it doesn’t load automatically, type exec start-psxitarch.sh and press Enter.
  5. That’s it! You should be now on Psxitarch v3!

Step 3. Set up swap space (Optional, but recommended)

Setting up a proper swap space is recommended. It is especially beneficial for gaming and other heavy tasks. To do so, just follow the instructions below.

  1. Open a terminal and type su. It will ask for a password. Enter ps4. You should now have root access.
  2. Next, type cd / and press Enter.
  3. Then, type touch /swapfile.
  4. Next, you have to decide how much swap space you require. 4GB to 8GB of swap is recommended for gaming. Assuming, you want to have 8GB of swap, type fallocate -l 8GB /swapfile and press Enter.
  5. Then, type chmod 600 /swapfile and press Enter.
  6. Following that, type mkswap /swapfile and press Enter.
  7. Finally, type swapon /swapfile and press Enter.
  8. To make this permanent, type nano /etc/fstab. This will open the file, fstab in a text editor.
  9. Use the arrow keys to scroll to the last empty line and type /swapfile none swap sw 0 0. Press Ctrl+X followed by Enter.
  10. Press Y when prompted with “Save modified buffer” and Enter.
  11. Confirm that the file name to write is /etc/fstab and press Enter.

If this method doesn’t work, try this alternate swap creation method (second one in the section).

Psxitarch v3: Common issues and solutions

There are some known issues as explained by the team. here, we will also list the possible solutions for each one of them, one by one.

Black screen on boot on Psxitarch v3

A very common issue with most PS4 Linux distros. This fortunately can be easily fixed by pressing ALT + F11 followed by ALT + F12. Else, try ALT + F1 followed by ALT + F2.

Glitches while gaming with Vulkan

If you face this issue, just quit the game. Open the Vulkan config app, switch to ACO, if on LLVM, or vice versa. Then, try restarting the game in question.

Core usage jumps to 100% when Ethernet cable is connected to PS4

This has been a known issue since the first kernels for PS4 Linux. The best way to avoid this, for now, is to just disconnect the Ethernet cable when on PS4 Linux.

USB Devices (keyboard, mouse, etc.) not detected

Try reconnecting. If that doesn’t work, try powering the console off by long pressing the power button. Then, reload the distro and check again.

Conclusion

Again, I’d like to thank the whole PS3ITA Team and the contributors for their hard work, which has made this possible today. If you face any issues while following this article, I am just a comment away. I will try my best to resolve the issue.

37 Comments

    • This can be quite tricky. This will have to be done when the initramfs is loaded, i.e., on the Rescueshell, mainly the edid.bin file. Let me see what can be done to sort this out. In the meantime, have you tried booting the distro, without these files?

    • How did you install it to the internal? I’m having problems with it failing when selecting how much storage i want to use. Something about key keymapper ps4hdd already exists…

    • Switch channel on tv, or unplug hdmi and plug it back in, Then press ctrl+alt+F1 then ctrl+alt+F2 or in reverse order =)
      That should display a login prompt.

  1. Great job. In my case, on ps4 pro, once the system is installed it works correctly, but the bluetooth does not work, when trying to open the manager it closes abruptly, I have tried restarting, stopping and even updating blueman, but nothing, I don’t know if it’s my problem , or from the distro :/

  2. We have managed internal install. Create Arch.img with Nazky’s initramfs.cpio.gz and wait for error caused by wrong file ending .GZ. this is ok, we just want that Arch.img in /user/home/

    After error we need 2 commands:
    Still in rescueshell:
    Code:

    tar -xvf /ps4hdd/system/boot/arch.tar.gz -C /newroot –numeric-owner

    and finally:
    Code:

    exec switch_root /newroot /newroot/sbin/init

    (i had to do this command 2 or 3 times than psxitarch boots up)
    enjoy

  3. Is there a way to downgrade the graphics drivers after doing a system update? Before I reinstalled this distro for the 8th time that was my problem everytime I updated the system it displayed errors and wouldn’t load any program anymore. Is there a special way I should update it? I tell people to make sure they make a backup because of my horrible experience trying to figure out what was causing my issue. Modded warfare updated his distro no problem, but when I copy the steps it breaks the whole thing.

  4. Hi there and congratulations for a wonderful job! I am using psxitarch v2 distro and until recently i decided to switch the new version. AFter a successful install I have noticed the following error. After using any different kind of kernel the graphic driver doesn’t seem to work. I can’t use retroarch or any other program which use the ps4 radeon driver. Is there any solution for this or I have to switch to another distro?
    I have ps4 pro baikal version.

  5. I can’t get root access , what’s the password?, I tried : changeit & changeme , trying to update & install kde plasma , also you guys sure alt f11 fixes black screen ( whitehaxer Baikal kernel on slim) still can’t get any other kernel to work besides the 4.1.14 , any ubuntu jammy jelly fish based distros coming in anytime soon ? Great work !

  6. Got root access with “changeit” but failed to update , missing dependencies wouldn’t let me install kde , but great work

  7. When i clicked logout the screen went black and everytime i run linux it becomes a black screen pressing Alt f11 and stuff didn’t work.

    But most importantly even when linux did work i simply couldn’t install wine and lutris I tried for more than 12 hours straight and couldn’t do it. It even made the system more f***** up now since I upgraded some packages and i have to upgrade another one and another one till infinity this doesn’t end so I don’t think it’s possible to run wine and lutris rn and it’s really not fun

  8. ahh help i’m facing this problem while i am installing exec psxitarch.sh

    ERROR: no valid usb device found! Try remove, reinsert the usb device and run again install-psxitarch.sh

  9. Hi
    I installed this on my PS4 pro (CUH-7117B) successfully and this works almost perfectly to use as my own linux server.
    I’m going to figure out a function that reboots into linux from linux. (In order to pass the procedure starts from PS4 menu)
    Seems that kexec can figure out but I have no idea how to refer to bzImage and initramfs.
    1. Is it possible reboot directly from linux to linux (Using kexec or whatever)?
    2. If possible, How can I make kexec to refer to bzImage and initramfs files?
    Any comments are welcome!

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