Slashdot Mirror
Developing On the PS3 Under Fedora
An anonymous reader writes to point out the first in a series of articles from a while back about using the Playstation 3 as a development environment under Fedora. Here are the second and third parts of the series. Quoting:
"Early on, it was a bit of a challenge to get Linux natively installed on the PS3. Time has passed, and a great deal has changed. Fedora 7 installs on the PS3 out of the box, with the most challenging installation steps eliminated. This article introduces the basic configuration knobs and widgets specific to the PS3 running Linux, shows you how to use them effectively, and suggests the kind of trickery that gets improved performance."
You should watch this and save yourself some time. There is no real point in doing it except to do it, in which case you might as well just watch somebody else.
Oh I've already seen the (more than one) videos of Linux on the PS3. I want to play around with some Cell coding; that's the only reason TO do it. The PS3 has a web browser already so installing Linux to just a somewhat functional web appliance is probably a waste of time.
The 3-part article tells very little about PS3-specific hacks. Basically, the author was telling you how to strip the Fedora system so that it could run on the resource-limited hardware without being too slow. This includes stopping unecessary daemons, ditch GNOME for twm, and running the X server on another box (or getting rid of X altogether).
This also apply to everything that Fedora can run on.
I fail to see how this is related to ``developing on the PS3 under Fedora''. The article didn't say much about development. If by ``developing'' you mean compiling your code in Fedora running inside a PS3 (which is under a virtualized environment) may be you have some points. But this is not developing for the PS3 platform. This is developing for a virtualized Linux platform.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
The FA is almost half a year old, and focusses on Fedora 7, which is EOL. Surely much must have changed since then, with Fedora 8 and 9, and probably other distros as well.
I wish we could access the GPU but I understand why Sony doesn't want that.
Well, I wish somebody would explain it to me. I presume the answer has something to do with piracy, but I don't see how that has a damn thing to do with access to the graphics chip under Linux. I mean, if they want to prevent you booting disks that haven't been officially signed, then that's fair enough (just about), but what does limiting the access to the GPU achieve?
This whole business of running Linux is basically just a tax dodge anyhow - because, if it didn't run Linux, the EU would have classified it as a game, rather than a computer, and slapped a higher import duty on it.
The EU should have stood firm and said "if you want to claim it's a computer, then users should be able to program the facilities of the *whole* computer".
How happy would you be if you bought a new PC, only to find out that, no, you can't access the GPU, etc from your own programs?
I wish we could access the GPU but I understand why Sony doesn't want that.
Well, I wish somebody would explain it to me. I presume the answer has something to do with piracy, but I don't see how that has a damn thing to do with access to the graphics chip under Linux.
Well, I'm just guessing, but this is my theory.
You can't just write games for consoles, you need to be a registered developer, and have a business relationship with the manufacturer, Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft. This has two goals, first, the manufacturer gets a cut out of your profits, second, the manufacturer gets to decide what runs on the console, so there aren't any subpar titles that give it a bad name.
If Linux could access the GPU, we'd have lots of nifty games ported to the PS3 in no time (Sauerbraten, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, etc. etc.), and later on developers might write games specifically for the PS3/Linux, just to get around the cost of developing using the 'normal' procedure for consoles. Sony, according to this theory, wants to avoid such things, for the reasons I said before: no more guaranteed profit per game played on their consoles, and no control over what games are played on them either.
I think it's crappy reasoning, personally.
Again, the tax myth. The tax doesn't exist, hasn't existed since before Linux on the PS2 was released. It was Yabasic that was an attempt to dodge the tax, not Linux.
By the way, you CAN install a bigger HD in the PS3, Sony tells you how in the manual.
The cellprocessor is actually a 'normal' powerpc processor (2 threads), with 8 coprocessors (Synergistic Processor cores, 1 thread each), optimized for single precisionfloating point operations. All 9 cores can use DMA simultaneous... Since the cell is actually an 'upgraded' powerpc, all FLOSS code will run on it, of course not optimazed... That's why it's so easy to port linux to it...
A two processor Xeon 3.0 ghz quad core system would have an xhpl-relevant Rpeak of about 96 Gflops. Two cell processors (of the Poer8XCelli varaint, not the ones in PS3) has an Rpeak of 200 Gigaflops. The power consumption of those are about even. So the processor achieves over twice the aggregate performance within a comparable power envelope. *THAT* is why it's interesting.
See the #1 Top500 system. Not significantly more power usage than Intel systems, but blows the Intel ones out of the water.
The thing about code is, a Cell system can run the same C code other platforms can. Not blazingly fast, mind you, but it isn't like you *must* retool everything. In order to get the 2x boosts in certain code loops, yes, you would have to, but a lot of that is done already.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The PS3 platform *is* a virtualized platform. Linux is as close to the metal as Sony's own OS. So if you start kernel hacking you're closer to the metal than any PS3 game ever gets.
The main point of programming PS3 Linux is that you get to play with 6 SPUs.
There is no point in even installing Linux on a PS3 if you're *not* going to be doing this, hence the article is totally related to development on PS3. It just doesn't go very far.
The PowerXCell 8i version of the Cell processor can do 102 GFLOPS double precision. However, the PS3 Cell chip only supports single precision natively.
the Cell chip in the PS3 does has a peak of around 200 GigaFLOPs single precision and 20 GigaFLOPs double precision
Yellow Dog, in my experience, is horrendously slow on the PS3. Fedora 8 on the other hand runs like silk.
Not to mention that Yellow Dog has long, closed development cycles. Only the Cell SDK 2.1 was supported for the longest time. While Fedora supported 3.0 soon after the new SDK's launch.
Yellow Dog also had an issue for quite awhile which did not allow system restarts. This is particularly annoying when you are SSH'd in from across town and realize that both of your PS3's now require a 120 reset.