It is unusual for gaming consoles to allow foreign operating systems to be installed on them. Sony decided to open up the PS3 console and allow third-party operating systems to be installed. Learn how to get started developing for the Cell BE processor on the PS3. This article provides an overview, installation, and first programming steps. Its the easiest way for programmers to get their hands on the new Cell Broadband Engine processor and take it for a drive.
FWIW, NetBSD is being ported to the PS3 as well.
Here’s the (ultra-short) dmesg:
http://www.jp.netbsd.org/ja/JP/ml/port-powerpc-ja/200612/msg00004.h…
and a “screenshot” of NetBSD/ps3 going multi-user mode:
http://nandra.segv.jp/NetBSD/PS3.jpg
total memory = 128 MB
avail memory = 115 MB
bus 80 MHz
cpu 3192 MHz
??? My best guess is they have to fix something (:if not anything, access to whole 256MB would be appreciated:) But, hail to the hackers working on this one.
Sony released the PS3 and the world went, “meh.”
MS and Nintendo are exacting a little revenge in the console arena.
not unusual, just not common
– PS2 has Linux
– Amiga CD32 has AmigaOS probably other OSs available (netbsd probably)
I’m sure there’s more.
even the PS2 does 1024×768 without an HDMI monitor and can have any size HDD up to 137GB – just sadly only 24mb RAM on the PS2
Except, as I understand things, Linux is run under a hypervisor that prevents access to all the really good hardware bits on the PS3. After all, Sony doesn’t want just anyone getting 100% out of the PS3 under Linux, do they?
Define “really good” bits. Linux gets full access to the Cell chip in the system, which is probably the most interesting part of the machine. The RSX isn’t much different than any other NVIDIA chip.
The RSX isn’t much different than any other NVIDIA chip.
Actually, RSX is legacy part of PS3. Sony can’t expect coders will start working on games for Cell the same moment PS3 hits the streets so they included RSX, while real preferred method would be avoiding RSX as much as possible and offload those jobs on Cell. Mesa for example running on Cell would be far more attractive than any other DRI, GLX implementation.
In perfect world, the only thing needed from RSX is to be able to display 2D.
Edited 2007-01-09 09:27
“real preferred method would be avoiding RSX as much as possible and offload those jobs on Cell.”
ROTFL
“total memory = 128 MB”
64Mb is dedicated to PS3OS + hypervisor
256-64 = 192 Mb should be available.
“real preferred method would be avoiding RSX as much as possible and offload those jobs on Cell.”
ROTFL
And where do you think those Cell 3D demonstrations were running (1mach plane simulation, complete heart simulation)? On some graphics card? Dream on.
If you check current engines you can see that they don’t support Cell yet.
256-64 = 192 Mb should be available.
I stand corrected
Edited 2007-01-09 17:25
“And where do you think those Cell 3D demonstrations were running (1mach plane simulation, complete heart simulation)? On some graphics card? Dream on.”
CELL can do cpu-friendly stuff like raycasting, and transformations, but drawing polygons is not what it is intended for. Specialized parallel hardware is several orders of magnitude faster at this task.
FYU i actually doing some CELL programming.
Edited 2007-01-10 11:34
This isn’t even close to true. Cell is far from being ideal for rasterizing 3D graphics. Take something very simple like trilinear filtering. For every pixel you write out, you need to load 8 texels and blend them together. The SPE can do one memory load and one arithmetic operation per clock cycle. You’re talking dozens of clock cycles just to get a single texel value, not to mention the final blending or multi-texturing or bump-mapping, or any of those things. Meanwhile, GPUs have multi-ported texture caches that can do the memory reads in just a couple of clock cycles, and lots of dedicated interpolation hardware in the texture units that can allow the chip to provide a texel to the pipeline every clock cycle.
There is a reason GPUs are advertised as performing trillions of operations per second. They have a ton of fixed-function hardware that is necessary for the general-purpose units (the shaders) to do their work efficiently.
The original reason sony wanted it to run a OS, was to get lower taxes in EU. They lost, but i guess they found that they could use the *nix-community to sell some more?
Look under distribution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS2_Linux
The main practical use is to give people such as students or academics, a sandbox to play with a hardware architecture — the Cell — that they could have trouble putting their hands on otherwise.
I was intrigued until I saw the thing about only being able to display on a TV at low resolution. Am I guessing correctly that once installed you can just network into this like any old device and be back in real usable resolution land on a remote machine? I’d love to have this to start dorking with cells.