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A More In Depth Look at PS/2 Linux
An anonymous reader writes "I have yet to see a GOOD review of the Linux (for Playstation 2) kit... until now... "
The article takes awhile to get to the point, but covers a lot of information
about what you can and can't do w/ the kit, and more interestingly what
the author thinks the kit is intended to accomplish.
Interestingly enough, the distribution chosen by Sony for the PS2 kit (Kondara Linux, not Kondora as the article states) is about to shut down.
There hasn't been an English announcement yet, but their Japanese site says that the Kondara Project servers (the free development group behind the Kondara distribution, which was retailed by Digital Factory, a commercial enterprise) will be closed down on July 15.
The reason for this is that Digital Factory, which owns the Kondara trademark, has sold its distribution business to another company, and the project was forced to quit using the name Kondara.
Luckily for fans of the distribution, a new group, which looks suspiciously like the old Kondara group, has just kicked off the Momonga Project (momonga is Japanese for flying squirrel).
It'll be interesting to see what Sony do, if anything, in the way of providing an upgrade path for PS2/Linux users.
I think the conslusion to this rather informative diddy is spot on, Sony is out to create a network of experienced PS2 programmers. Sony gets oodles of noodles for this move. The PS2 is probably the most popular video game system ever marketed to date, it makes Sony bunches of money. The only problem with the money making aspect is they need a constant stream of games for a system to be popular. Programmers are needed and plenty are interested but as the article says, experience with the platform is not as abundant as people willing to program for it. Sony distributes a system that allows people to poke around the platform and make their own amateur games in their spare time and get 2D6 bonus to their PS2 Programming skill.
Linux is the obvious choice for Sony to pick, not because Linux rox0rz d00dz but because it is a familiar environment for many developers and requires no licensing fee to distribute. The last thing Sony wants is their HDD/eth0 expansion system to cost them more money than it has the potential to make back for them. Paying a $20 or $50 royalty on some commercial OS (pick one, any one) per unit sold will end up costing them in terms of margins. Drives and ethernet adapters that only go down in price as time goes by and shipment volumes increase lead to high margins and eventually profits.
I've thought for a while Sony wants to migrate their computer division from being high priced IBM clone systems to being something proprietary and different. In many of their markets this is an easy sell because there is a shitload of brand loyalty. It might not be terribly difficult in the US either. Sony might pretty easily merge their VAIO desktop computers with future PlayStations. A wide availability of games and media designed specifically for Sony systems could make them a powerful player in the PC market. They already produce a ton of software for their VAIO systems, they could port a good deal of that to whatever OS they might use besides Windows on their new VAIO Stations.
This of course goes back to engendering developer support for the platform. By seeding PS2/3 platform developers early (now) they can set themselves up with a relatively large developer base, independant and otherwise, as long as they can keep their interest. Sony looks like they're intending to paint several markets with one broad brush. Derivitive systems based off the PlayStation architecture; from the dedicated console at $100 for playing games to the $2000 audio video workstation which happens to share 70% of the same parts or interfaces. Maybe Sony is looking to make a new Microsoft-free PC market. Can you forgive them for killing Napster? Tough choice.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
It's a standard Linux distribution - you can treat it as a (slow, 300MHz) MIPS machine if you want. You get gcc/g++ and everything else you might find in a modern(ish) distribution.
:-)
:-)
The gcc port understands the VU assember syntax, so you can embed asm() blocks and have the code for the VU run on the VU via the direct link, and code for the mips chip run there.
It also comes with vcl. This is a godsend - it takes your crap linear vector-unit assembly code and parellelises it onto the vector units as best it can, re-ordering etc. to get the most out of the units.
There are a couple of rather nice libraries (ps2stuff, ps2gl) which provide base-level things (ps2stuff) and an openGL-like layer (ps2gl). To the extent that I could prove a bug in ps2gl by taking the same source code and compiling on my (i386) linux pc with 'g++ stars.cpp -o stars -L/usr/X11R6/lib -LGL -lglut'. Fantastic
Ps2gl allows you to code renderers in VU assembly, and associate a new primitive type that can be placed in the DMA stream, which will call your new rendered automatically. There's an example of this shipped with the kit.
The only fly in the ointment is that the gcc shipped is only 32-bit, which means all the 128-bit registers get stomped on if they're passed as function arguments. There is apparently a patch in SCEE that will help this, although it'll lead to static binaries until everything is compiled with it (I don't care!). This will finally allow the VU's to do all the matrix and quaternion algebra they're really good at, and the system will fly
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
The article is extremely accurate as to the packaging. I had expected a small box with a CD and a drive... but it was a large box that was well-crammed with packages. Sorta like xmas.
Like the author, of all the monitors I had none that were sync-on-green (www.playstation2-linux.com has a compatible monitor database so you can check before you try to see if you have a proper monitor). Like the author, I did the blind install (instructions also available at the above URL).
The blind install worked flawlessly for me and took about an hour (45 minutes of which it simply rattled away on it's own doing the install).
So... what do I do with it? Well, I have a number of uses. First... it is a wonderfully inexpensive full *NIX workstation. Because I am in Hawaii and my servers are in the mainland, I use computers in my house to monitor my remote servers on a full-time basis... the PS2 allows me to check my servers from the living room (instead of having to go up to the office constantly). Towards this end, I am designing 3D remote monitor software (that will monitor servers and display load, disk space, users, mail, dns health, etc... in a nice 3D graphical environment).
We also run the game 'tranquility' (www.TQworld.com), and are looking at rewriting it for the PS2 under Linux (I don't know if there is a market yet for Linux based PS2 games, but we'll give it a shot anyway).
The bottom line? Very very very impressive packaging. Good attention to detail - but yes, it's a geek thing because you have to be innovative and a digger to find all the info you want.
A very nice design... and also... price-wise pretty good. I can certainly envision a rack of PS2's humming along. According to the www.playstation2-linux.com website, a number of people have had them up and running as web servers for quite some time... and report great stability.
I have seen only one problem so far. When I ssh to remote servers and run 'top' for 5 days straight, upon stopping the remote connection and trying to do something else I have now twice seen ethernet errors of *no more space* (no more space on ethernet???? what gives with that)... so there are some caveats - but all in all, very very impressive.
The author, however, is 100% correct when he says it will be 6 months learning to fully understand/use the device. The manuals are complex and somewhat confusing (even though I have 25+ years of assembly and graphics coding on SGI etc..) it WILL take a while to understand and experiment with.
The only thing I need now is a MUCH longer keyboard cable so I can program from the sofa ;))
Aloha Nui Loa