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PS3 Linux Now Installable

Posted by Zonk on Fri Nov 17, 2006 11:26 AM
from the yes-because-it's-a-supercomputer dept.
Software PlayStation (Games) Linux
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)."
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  • does it come beowulf ready?

    nothing like a cluster of $10,000 nodes [ebay.com]..

  • PowerPC? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Constantine XVI (880691) <trash@eighty+slashdot.gmail@com> on Friday November 17 2006, @11:32AM (#16885498)
    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?

    • Re:PowerPC? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2006, @11:38AM (#16885614)
      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.)
    • it'd be easier to just do Mac-on-linux instead

      http://www.maconlinux.org/ [maconlinux.org]

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by drinkypoo (153816)
        Short Answer: Binary format (it's cell, not PowerPC), bootloader and drivers.

        Too bad you're wrong about that binary format. The Cell's PPE is a PowerPC; the SPEs are the cell execution units.

        Well, you might be right, but just not because it's not PowerPC, because it is PowerPC; however, AFAIK it's a somewhat stripped PPC. It's certainly no G4, let alone G5.

  • Almost (Score:5, Interesting)

    by androvsky (974733) on Friday November 17 2006, @11:34AM (#16885536)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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 lo
      • Sony won't boot a non-approved OS so don't hold out hope for a Linux that uses the RSX.

        The PS3 will boot any OS, but it runs under the hypervisor.

  • Yeah (Score:5, Funny)

    by eightball01 (646950) on Friday November 17 2006, @11:35AM (#16885542)
    But does it run... oh wait... it does!
    • Heh, that's a good one. But here's one you may not have thought of: does it run Linux?
    • I guess we have to get something geekier now that Linux has become mainstream.

      "Yeah, but does it run BSD?"; a new Slashdot meme is born!

  • Cool (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Foofoobar (318279) on Friday November 17 2006, @11:35AM (#16885554)
    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

  • Most except... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Odin_Tiger (585113) on Friday November 17 2006, @11:36AM (#16885558) Journal
    "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...
    • So...everything but the thing that makes the machine be what it is? That's great. At least you can play nethack...

      Its all about gameplay man, all about gameplay.

      (Or wait.. its Friday. Do we like high resolution graphics again today on Slahdot? I forget.)

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by hr.wien (986516)
        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.
  • 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 Li
    • Why do people like the cell processor? Its only here to make games shiny, but crappy:
      http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/ burn_the_house_.html [typepad.com]

      • Re:This is encouraging news. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TerranFury (726743) on Friday November 17 2006, @01:05PM (#16887260)

        >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! ;-)

        • It might be okay in games where artificial intelligence isn't attempted at all. Multiplayer games with no bots or enemies, or parlour games. For any game that should make use of artificial intelligence though its not good, and those are the games people want. People want first person shooters with AI so real you think its a human, or real time strategy games where the computer controlled opponents have more than a couple set build structures and attack patterns. The use of the cell processor in a mainstream
          • your comment was interesting... pray tell, how is it that a system custom-built for parallel processing is *bad* for ai? I'm an ai researcher and I'm dying to get my hands on one of these things cuz they'd be perfect for MAS/MRS research... hell, you could have 6 of those processors running the ai code for the 6 bots you're playing against... so please, tell me, how is it bad?

                  • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                    by Morphine007 (207082)

                    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'

          • Think about it. You've got an average of 6 processors to play with. Part of what makes AI for gaming so crappy right now is that it must all be stream-lined for a real-time system that shares processing time with graphics, sound, physics, etc. Look at the PC. What allowed us to create more realistic environments? The graphics accelerator (basically an additional processor).

            It may not happen right away, but dedicating a processor or two to artificial intelligence will undoubtedly lead to gameplay that

    • 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*.

      Rumors of the PS2 Linux kit circulated before the PS2 release and I think they may have even been confirmed before launch day. It took a while for the kit to come out, but come out it did - and it had the same flaw THIS kit does, which is to say a lack of graphics support.

      In other words, this is not really a credible attempt to deliver Li

      • Would you care to reference somewhere that states you can't access the graphics with PS2 Linux? It seemed to run OpenGL just fine to me. By default you didn't have direct access to the graphics hardware, but you weren't forced to just use a frame buffer like you currently are with the PS3; however, I'm sure Nvidia with fix that.
        • Sorry, it's the DVD drive you couldn't use at all. You can use the graphics hardware in a crippled fashion using OpenGL as you say. So far the PS3 has neither, although perhaps you can use the optical drive, certainly I haven't read anywhere that you can't.
            • There will likely be new drivers for the HDD that will allow you to view the whole thing. That was developed for the original PS2 Linux. As for the DVD-ROM lock down, that was due to how the PS2 authenticated disks to be readable. Using a modchip this made any disk look like an original enabled full usage of the disk drive. An external USB optical drive was also an option.

  • PS3... Linux... Sony... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    PlayStation 3....

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

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

  • How long for MythTV, MAME etc.? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DrXym (126579) on Friday November 17 2006, @11:59AM (#16885984)
    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...
    • That's actually a really good idea. This is already designed to fit under the TV while including a DVD drive, be silent, use TV-out, etc. MythTV on it would rule.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by DrXym (126579)
        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.

  • IBM has a huge amount of Cell resources online (Score:5, Informative)

    by RichardMarks (1011125) on Friday November 17 2006, @11:59AM (#16885988)
    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 [ibm.com]

    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...

    • Hi,

      Any chance of any links to these pictures and results, I for one would be interested.
    • Unless you're concerned about things like wireless networking or being able to use SD, CF and Memory Stick cards.
        • I am one of the people who worked with the Cell emulator when it first came out [slashdot.org].
          If I recall correctly (it's been a year) they still only have an x86 emulator, not a PPC emulator. However, it's a full-featured environment and very useful. Of course, it's only designed to work with Fedora, which is where I was involved--I successfully ported it to several other linux distros, but there wasn't a lot of demand for the patch I had, so I've moved on to other things.
  • But does it run NetBSD?
    If not, hopefully someone can port it.
    If BSD can run on a toaster, surely it can run on the "most powerfull games machine ever created" (or so says sony PR)
    • I know nothing about BSD tbh, but it can't be that difficult. You got all the code you need, so basically an experienced BSD hacker should be able to add support within BSD in a rather short time.

  • Gentoo (Score:2, Interesting)

    by gentoofu (1028702)
    I wonder how long it would take to install Gentoo and the stuff on it...
  • let me guess this is going to be as great as the ps2 linux kit. remember that thing?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by CronoCloud (590650)
      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.

    • The PS2 Linux kit was perfectly okay, it was just by the time you added the cost of the hd, network adapter, keyboard, mouse and OS onto cost of the PS2 you were left with something that wasn't good for much and certainly far less capable than a PC.

      The PS3 doesn't require you buy anything extra, or even use a specially "blessed" version of Linux. Just plug in any USB mouse and keyboard, burn any Linux for PS3 onto CD and install. I expect that Fedora, Ubuntu, YDL and specialist Myth / Mame Linuces will ap

  • Can anyone run Java on it? This would be a great opportunity to showcase the 'run-anywhere' aspect of it. Once the source is released (AFAIK it's only been announced not released) I'm sure that the community could come up with some wicked optimizations even if it is just dedicating one core to garbage collection and another for analyizing for runtime optimizations.

    • Re:Graphics Chip will never work (Score:4, Interesting)

      by LWATCDR (28044) on Friday November 17 2006, @11:56AM (#16885936) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • It's simple, without a graphic chips it impossible to use Linux to play pirated games.

        It would be impossible anyway. The only advantage you'd have is using that Linux to try to bootstrap a pirated game, but since they were obviously lying about the PS3 including Linux on the hard drive when it ships, no PS3 game is going to be written to run under Linux -- they'll all be running on the bare metal.

    • It's nice that Sony will let us run Linux, but I highly doubt the graphic chip will ever work on Linux

      A lot of people highly doubted that Sony was serious about this Linux thing, and here it is on launch day. It's likely that Sony hasn't had time to write graphics chip drivers yet since they've been busy with... other things. For console devs they probably just provided bare-metal access and moved on.

      From the looks of it, Sony built support for non-game OS from the very beginning, and most of the wor

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by brunascle (994197)
      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.
        • 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 m
    • PSP anyone?

      How long before they accidentally break Linux in an "update" then?

      (Just poking fun. I think it's cool, if it really works.)

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