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PS3 Linux Now Installable

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the yes-because-it's-a-supercomputer dept.

Quinton writes "Around midnight Pacific time on the 17th, Sony updated their Open Platform website needed to install PPC Linux on the PS3. The FTP Site contains the CELL Linux ADDON CD image, which has the bootloader (kboot/otheros.bld) and instructions needed to install Fedora Core 5, PPC. A full install from DVD takes about two hours. Most all hardware is supported except for graphics accelerator support (framebuffer only, up to 1920x1200)."

24 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. neato by undercanopy · · Score: 2, Funny

    does it come beowulf ready?

    nothing like a cluster of $10,000 nodes..

    --
    -- D-23994, Muff#2613
  2. PowerPC? by Constantine+XVI · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Did they say they were running standard PowerPC Linux on the PS3? In theory, what would stop us (besides Apple's legal dept.) putting the PowerPC Mac OSX on it?

    --
    "I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
    1. Re:PowerPC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      In theory, what would stop us (besides Apple's legal dept.) putting the PowerPC Mac OSX on it?

      The same thing that prevented people from installing the PPC OS X on any other non-Apple PPC hardware. Namely, lack of support for the hardware itself. (Hint: just because the code is compiled to a specific processor doesn't mean that it automatically has hardware support for all of the other various chipset components--it just means it knows how to talk to the processor.)

    2. Re:PowerPC? by chasingporsches · · Score: 2, Informative

      it'd be easier to just do Mac-on-linux instead

      http://www.maconlinux.org/

  3. Almost by androvsky · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's a hypervisor running between the kernel and the hardware, so I don't think it's going to be an easy task to hack the nvidia ppc macintosh drivers to run on this thing. I got the impression from the documentation that the accelerator was pretty much locked off, but even if it wasn't, we're pretty much stuck waiting for nvidia to cough up a binary driver blob. Unless someone wants to port opengl to the cell spus. It couldn't be nearly as fast as the nvidia chip, geforce3 territory at best, but it could support any kind of shaders you throw at it.

    1. Re:Almost by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Sony won't boot a non-approved OS so don't hold out hope for a Linux that uses the RSX. Besides, you're not missing much. The RSX is a severely cut down nv40-based chip. As people are just now finding out, it has no scaler and no video acceleration (as in "PureVideo"). It is just a vertex shading pipeline and a very simplified pixel shading pipeline. Sony expected people to do all their pixel effects on the Cell, but that isn't working out too well which is why people are noticing fullscreen effects looking worse on PS3 versions of games like NFS:Carbon. Sigh. It's the PS2 all over again. Lots of raw processing power that is wasted because it is crippled by an underpowered, feature-poor rasterizer. It's like Sony couldn't create a balanced hardware design to save its life.

  4. Yeah by eightball01 · · Score: 5, Funny

    But does it run... oh wait... it does!

  5. Cool by Foofoobar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This and the cell processor were the major reasons why I was looking forward to the PS3. Blu-ray and HD-dvd still have to fight it out and it doesn't look like it's going to end quickly

    --
    This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
  6. Most except... by Odin_Tiger · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Most all hardware is supported except for graphics accelerator support (framebuffer only, up to 1920x1200)."

    So...everything but the thing that makes the machine be what it is? That's great. At least you can play nethack...

    --
    Unpleasantries.
    1. Re:Most except... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      You have access to the SPUs. There's a filesystem interface for getting at their memory, dma state, mailboxes (spufs) and a higher level library on top of that (libspe).

      -Q

    2. Re:Most except... by hr.wien · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The Cell PPE is a dual issue, dual threaded, in-order core, which means it ain't all that. A normal G4 would probably kill it. Yellow Dog Linux on the Cell only runs on the PPE (leveraging the other cores would take some heavy re-engineering of just about every piece of software in it), so I think it's safe to say the PS3 Linux experience won't be anything special either. Fun to play with, sure, but certainly no speed demon.

  7. This is encouraging news. by LogicHoleFlaw · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Honestly, this is pretty cool. I'd love to get a PS3 to play around with the Cell processor. This is really a new thing - far from discouraging homebrew hacking on their system, Sony is making it possible to install a full-blown Linux system on *launch day*. The hardware in the system is all standard stuff so everything should Just Work. I imagine that the community will have the custom graphics processor up and running in no time. If I understand correctly, the seven Cell cores are already supported by Linux due to IBM's desire to have the Cell architecture be used in more than just PS3s. It's just the custom graphics chipset which needs to have drivers written.

    I can understand why Sony hasn't written such drivers - it looks like they've architected the system to be easy to install alternative OSes, but they haven't gone out of their way to write code for a particular 3rd party OS vendor. I look forward to seeing where this all goes.

    --
    -- Flaw
    1. Re:This is encouraging news. by TerranFury · · Score: 4, Insightful

      >Why do people like the cell processor?

      It's not about the games. It's more important than that: The Cell points in the direction in which we can expect all computing to move. The Cell has a lot of hype which should be taken with your-daily-recommended-value-of-sodium-chloride, but I think it's true that it represents a legitimate effort by a company to put R&D into a new architecture designed around multiple cores. That matters.

      Up front: A gaming machine might be the wrong application for the Cell. A lot of the buzz surrounding the Cell actually has to do with using the processors for scientific computation: The supercomputing market. I'm sure IBM et al didn't design the Cell with that in mind, since it's only a 32-bit chip (and serious scientific computation tends to require more precision than that), but I've heard rumors of a new 64-bit Cell (if IBM didn't scrap that project when they gutted their PowerPC/microprocessor teams of late).

      But the Cell represents an important direction in processor design because, frankly, it looks like we can't make the chips much faster: We're already switching logic at microwave frequencies! It used to be that we could keep making transistors smaller and smaller and they'd get faster and faster -- but now, scaling is bottoming out: oxide thicknesses are 4 atoms! Since we can't push the transistors much more (I'm not counting on finFETs to save the day), we need to start paying attention to the architecture. I'm glad that someone is doing something a little innovative.

      And you know: Maybe it's ok for games too. It was always my fantasy to do realtime raytracing. How about radiosity or photon mapping at interactive framerates? Those algorithms parallelize pretty well! ;-)

    2. Re:This is encouraging news. by Morphine007 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      funny... I write my ai code in C... game developers usually use whatever they're coding their games in... I still don't see how poor handling of branch prediction* (or no handling of it at all) is going to have any effect on whether or not a coder can code in an ai using a language that completely and utterly abstracts that low level crap away? There's a difference between not being able to easily code something, and not having your code run in quite the optimized way that it used to. The former simply isn't true from anything I've seen (hell... even ASSEMBLER abstracts that extremely low level shit away...) and the latter is a matter that's up for debate; having your code run a bit slower than normal is somewhat bad, but having it be able to run on a dedicated processor and hence much faster than normal more than makes up for it.

      So I'm still calling bullshit on this one so far, but only because no one has given any details... if you know them, please show 'em...

      * - it should be noted that branch prediction is just an OPTIMIZATION technique at the hardware level... code in whatever language you want, it'll still run fine, the processor just won't have already prefetched the instruction and associated memory blocks... if this is all the FUD boils down to, then it's massively busted since my (and anyone elses) ai code will still run perfectly fine on it....

      --
      Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
  8. PS3... Linux... Sony... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    PlayStation 3....

    Linux... Good!
    Sony... Bad!

    but but... which is greater...?
    *head explodes*

  9. Re:Graphics Chip will never work by LWATCDR · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's simple, without a graphic chips it impossible to use Linux to play pirated games.

    With out the graphics chip it is impossible to run any good games in Linux.

    If Sony opened up the graphics chip then people could create games without Sony's okay.

    On a bright note it opens up the critter to emulators :)
    MAME PS/3 anyone?
    When it calms down and the price drops I might get one.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  10. Re:Fedora, not Yellow Dog? by brunascle · · Score: 2, Informative

    they are. Yellow Dog seems to be the only distro branding it as "linux for the PS3" but it sounds like you can use pretty much any PowerPC version.

  11. How long for MythTV, MAME etc.? by DrXym · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Install Linux, install Myth, plugin a Haupage WinTV USB device - the PS3 becomes a PVR, plays DiVX etc. Or install MAME, UAE, Virtual Boy, SheepShaver, QEMU, Bochs and you have a pretty decent console / arcade gaming rig. Might even be able to play those SNES / N64 titles before they turn up on the Wii...

    1. Re:How long for MythTV, MAME etc.? by ClamIAm · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Unfortunately, there's no driver for the graphics card. If one never surfaces, just hope and pray that you can somehow wrangle those SPEs into doing all that video decoding.

    2. Re:How long for MythTV, MAME etc.? by DrXym · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I have no idea what the refresh rate & characteristics are the display buffer, but it should possible to offload codecs, zip/bzip2 compression and even parts of Mesa (shaders, transformations, etc.) onto the SPEs. The net result would be a system which while not stellar should be able to put out reasonable 3D and video performance.

      I expect a whole cottage industry will spring up to add functionality to the various libs that does just that.

  12. IBM has a huge amount of Cell resources online by RichardMarks · · Score: 5, Informative

    To get a glimpse of what you have to look forward to when you install Linux on your PS3:

    http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/d ocs_documentation.html

    Best option is getting the $499 20gig model and buying a 100+ gig drive to upgrade the machine. The PS3 will partition the disk for you right from a menu and then you just follow the instructions they give you for the distro of your choice. People who just got their machines this morning already have things going and are posting pictures and results.

    There is a full set of all the normal Linux dev tools that you get with any distro but there also is the Cell devkit - which you can get right now to check out although you won't be able to run anything of course.

    Cell programming is incredibly cool...

  13. Gentoo by gentoofu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder how long it would take to install Gentoo and the stuff on it...

  14. Re:ps2 by CronoCloud · · Score: 2, Informative

    Of course I remember the PS2 Linux kit, I have one.

    This is different, it requires no additional hardware, is free, and is available at launch.

  15. Compute Cluster? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It still sounds good for a target for a massive compute cluster, ala BigMac. If the algorithm is sufficiently simple and easily parallelized the lack of branch prediction and out of order execution might not be too bad, especially at a FLOP-per-$ or FLOP-per-square-foot or FLOP-per-Watt*$ basis. My uneducated guess is that this would work out OK using gcc 4 (with SSA trees) on things like BlueGene does or even just computing Rainbow tables. Without myrinet or inifiniband you'd need a good ram cache and more CPU than I/O.

    Anybody doing this for a day job care to comment/shred my guesses?

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)