“Power Developer is pleased to provide the relevant Linux support patches and documentation for running Linux on the Sony PlayStation 3. The PlayStation 3 games console was released in Japan today and will go on sale in the US market on Friday, 17th November.”
Pretty cool that they actually made this available to all developers instead of just concentrating on selected few commercial partners.
A quick overview:
You can use the Cell processor, SPU’s, HDD,audio, lan, usb etc…, HDMI port(PlatformSpecificUtilities.html)
What about the BD-ROM and 3d acceleration?
edit: Seems that there is support for the CD-ROM (ps3pf_storage_base.diff).
Edited 2006-11-12 15:29
I read that there’s no 3d acceleration at this time.
It’s still being worked on heavily.
As promised, Sony opens up PS3. This really adds value to the console and is great advantage over main competitor’s offerings (MS & nintendo).
Graphic card is essentialy a G70 variant. I hope that nvidia will release a binary driver for Cell soon (Sony might give a blessing). If not, maybe that void will be filled by the nouveau driver.
Since Linux runs on a Hypervisor inside the PS3, i have the following question.
Can the hypervisor be used to abstract the Graphic Card, and provide some APIs for the 3d acceleration?
Can the hypervisor be user to limit the use of the BD-ROM.(forbid reading the BD disks from linux?)
Edited 2006-11-12 16:06
Wait… It runs under virtualization? Can you provide a link for that info?
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/files/Playstation/linux-20061110-docs…
LinuxKernelOverview.html
Linux kernel can access some devices directly (e.g. USB host controller). Other devices are virtualized by hypervisor and device service is provided via hypervisor call. For example, storage service hypervisor calls are available. See following sections for detail.
As I see it, limiting use of 3d is basically a way for Sony/IBM to have the cake and eat it in the same time.
1. they can trump added value of PS3 besides gaming by enabling linux compatibility, for use in utility/non gaming software. It will fully expose cell but limit access to GPU/BDA.
2. they can grow cell developers/researchers community, (esp. in academia) which is essenctial for the architecture’s further acceptance
3. they still can offset the subsidized PS3 price by providing proprietary (read expensive) gaming SDK under NDA which allows access to full GPU power.
Edited 2006-11-13 10:01
Does anyone know if the RAM is upgradable? With 1GB many things can be done!!!!
I doubt that. IBM sells cell based blades for a small fortune for “serious things”.
Can someone remind me why Microsoft went to such considerable lengths to prevent anyone running Linux on the 360?
Sony have made them look a bit stupid now…
Yeah I’ll give you a little reminder, could it be becuase Microsoft also makes Windows? I don’t think they would encourage people to install Linux on their console.
>Can someone remind me why Microsoft went to such considerable lengths to prevent anyone running Linux on the 360?
They didn’t do anything specific to block Linux. They blocked everything to get rid of pirated games.
I can’t wait to see Linux running on PS3.
AWESOME!
I wanna see performance of Linux on PS3.
Anyone can tell me that why SONY chose YellowDog? Why not some other distro? Is there anything special in YellowDog? Actually I had never used this distro, thats why I am asking this.
Actually I am Ubuntu fan…
They went with YellowDog since YellowDog is an all PowerPC distro. Which the Cell chip is similar to I guess.
>They went with YellowDog since YellowDog is an all PowerPC distro. Which the Cell chip is similar to I guess.
Or maybe Yellow Dog went to Sony because Apple basicly destroyed their bussiness.
and both YD and sony are rooted in Japan.
Your guess makes some sense as compared to others.
Good!
YellowDog was the expert on getting Linux running on Power based processors back in the day. Remember all the YellowDog PowerPC releases? I think Cell is similar in design to the Power chip but I could be wrong?
My first encounter with PowerPC was with SUSE Linux on an IBM server machine. It was long after, that I ever heard of YDL. And now, with the kind help of Genesi, it’s Gentoo Linux, which first supports PS3 with freely available downloads. Of course, the first thing I’ll do when I can put my hands on a PS3 is to port SUSE Linux to it 🙂 It’s a shame, that it arrived too late to have official support for it in openSUSE 10.2…
YellowDog are basically an enhanced ppc version of Fedora Core. In fact, Fedora Core 5 was used as software development kit (SDK) on the Cell architecture with these documentation from IBM themselves:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cellstartsim…
Given their advanced skill with the Fedora Core on ppc architecture and the fact YellowDog was the team behind the existence of YUM, a package manager for both Fedora Core and YellowDog, it was natural for them to choose the former.
Are you sure ?
I thought YellowDog was “already” around before Fedora ?
Is it then maybe RedHat based ?
EDIT :
“Terra Soft is a small, privately held company in Loveland, Colorado. The company was formed in 1999, and initially focused on offering Yellow Dog Linux .. .”
-> http://www.itmanagersjournal.com/feature/20980
& 1999 is way before Fedora … okay later in the article it says “based on Fedora” – but then they must have changed to Fedora – or well “changed” from RedHat to Fedora .
Edited 2006-11-13 01:28
Are you sure ?
I thought YellowDog was “already” around before Fedora ?
Is it then maybe RedHat based ?
Red Hat Linux to be specific. When the former was no longer in production, Terrasoft switched to Fedora Core as base distribution. You have answered to you own question when you have edited your post.
The Power Developer site is Genesi and they are supporting it for Gentoo and all of Linux it seems. I don’t think Sony chose any company, they chose Linux and that is a good thing. Thanks to Genesi too for supporting it.
Rasmus
well it’s not quite gaming on linux but it is most certainly gaming and linux. If this works well this will be the cheapest high end gaming computer availible at 600. I think i might get one after the second chistmas.
well it’s not quite gaming on linux but it is most certainly gaming and linux
So is an Xbox (1). Or a standard dual-boot PC, for that matter.
If this works well this will be the cheapest high end gaming computer availible at 600.
Or you could get an Xbox 360 ($299) for gaming and a cheap Linux PC ($199 or, if second-hand, essentially free), both of which perform their tasks more ably than the PS3 does.
Good work Genesi! This is cool. I am one of the guys
who never plays anything.. If I want to game some I
always have the GameCube laying around..
Ever since it was public that all Next-Gen consoles
would be based on POWER technology I made up my mind.
The first console that lets me install Linux is the one
I am going to purchase.
They are all loaded up with DRM’s anyway so a Linux-
lover like me could have easily bought the XBOX 360
if they would allow me to run Linux on it..
Thanks to Genesi it looks like I’m getting a nice PS3.
Thanks Luca and Pieter for making this possible!
http://felter.org/wesley/files/ps3/linux-20061110-docs/
So you don’t have to download the .tar.bz2 file; it’s all HTML anyway. It is true: no 3D acceleration.
Can the hypervisor be user to limit the use of the BD-ROM.(forbid reading the BD disks from linux?)
Sure, but why?
“Sure, but why?”
So that you can’t rip a blu-ray disc to the hard drive probably.
http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/lu_zero/timeline
Nice work Luca!
Here is the rest of the story: http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2006/11/community-is-computer.html
Since the BD drive is basically ATAPI device, Linux can issue ATAPI commands by ioctl. Some of ATAPI commands have been rejected by the hypervisor call because of security issues.
So that you can’t rip a blu-ray disc to the hard drive probably.
AACS prevents Blu-ray ripping; there’s no need to block access to the drive. (Did anyone try to block Linux from accessing DVD drives? No, because it doesn’t matter.)
I’m not saying that Blu-ray reading will be blocked. I think the docs indicate that it won’t be. But if it was, then it would be as added copy protection. Probably in case DVD Jon succeeds with his “DeAACS.”
I don’t have the time to check by myself, could someone tell me if everything is open source or there is some binary package? The idea is to port operating systems other than Linux.