Slashdot Mirror
PS3 Linux Now Installable
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)."
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.
But does it run... oh wait... it does!
"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.
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.)
To get a glimpse of what you have to look forward to when you install Linux on your PS3:
d ocs_documentation.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/
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...
>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! ;-)