The Famed PS5 Linux Project Lead Quits Over a Premature Exploit Report to Sony

In April this year, we saw Andy Nguyen turning the PS5 into a Linux-powered gaming PC that ran Steam games and emulators, making good use of the hardware on-board.

Sadly, he has now announced that he is walking away from the PS5 hacking scene altogether and is stopping work on porting the project to the PS5 Pro, which would’ve shipped sometime in 2027.

All due to a single exploit

You see, running Linux on a PlayStation console is possible because the PS5 Linux project was able to find a way past the hypervisor using exploits Sony had already patched, covering firmware 3.00 through 7.61.

The issue starts with Andy gatekeeping a hypervisor bug that was still open on current firmware, one he says he had found a while earlier. It was prematurely divulged to Sony less than a day after the researchers who found it agreed to wait.

He clarified his position, saying that:

I asked them to at least wait for GTA 6 to come out so that people would have the opportunity to legally purchase the game and also enjoy linux.

Once Sony knows about a bug such as this, it’s only a matter of time before it’s patched, and that is where PlayStation’s bug bounty program on HackerOne comes in.

The ones who found it

While Andy has not named anybody in his post, you will find the reporter after a quick web search. Jordy has put out his side of things, laying out how he handled the bug.

By Jordy’s account, the bug was his own discovery, found with what he calls his “trusty ai clanker machine” and no help from anyone else. He had even agreed to Andy’s request to not disclose the findings.

Unexpectedly, a third person, still unnamed, found the same bug using AI a few hours later. Anticipating that there would be more people finding the same bug, Jordy decided to post the flaw on HackerOne.

The code is still there

The project’s GitHub page and all the related repositories are still there. Nothing has been archived as of today, and if you wanted to, you could start contributing to the PS5 Linux project by taking over any pending work or cooking up new improvements.

You should know that the loader currently supports the original model and the Slim on firmware 3.00 through 7.61, so your test device would need to be on one of those. The PS5 Pro support Andy was building never reached the repository, so you would have to start from scratch.

That’s the beauty of open source software. Even if the lead developer and key core maintainers decide to abandon a project, new people can easily take over the work or fork it, and steer it in a direction of their choosing.

While Andy’s departure is a blow to the plan for supporting newer PS5 firmware and the PS5 Pro, other contributors have shown that they can deliver work on the loader without him, and I am hopeful more will follow.