http://www.osnews.com/story/16892/Linux_on_the_PlayStation_3 Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:35:29 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?199634 http://osnews.com/thread?199634 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 Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ghen) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?199707 http://osnews.com/thread?199707 Sony released the PS3 and the world went, "meh."

MS and Nintendo are exacting a little revenge in the console arena. Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Phloptical) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?199800 http://osnews.com/thread?199800 not unusual, just not common

- PS2 has Linux
- Amiga CD32 has AmigaOS probably other OSs available (netbsd probably)

I'm sure there's more. Tue, 09 Jan 2007 03:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zhulien) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?199803 http://osnews.com/thread?199803 even the PS2 does 1024x768 without an HDMI monitor and can have any size HDD up to 137GB - just sadly only 24mb RAM on the PS2 Tue, 09 Jan 2007 03:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zhulien) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?199818 http://osnews.com/thread?199818 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? Tue, 09 Jan 2007 05:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (jo42) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?199822 http://osnews.com/thread?199822 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. Tue, 09 Jan 2007 05:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rayiner) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?199833 http://osnews.com/thread?199833 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 Tue, 09 Jan 2007 06:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (duckie) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?199859 http://osnews.com/thread?199859 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 Tue, 09 Jan 2007 09:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (somebody) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?199860 http://osnews.com/thread?199860 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. Tue, 09 Jan 2007 09:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (somebody) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?199864 http://osnews.com/thread?199864 "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. Tue, 09 Jan 2007 09:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (viton) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?199869 http://osnews.com/thread?199869 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. Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ElCabri) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?199980 http://osnews.com/thread?199980 "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 correctedEdited 2007-01-09 17:25 Tue, 09 Jan 2007 17:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (somebody) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?200025 http://osnews.com/thread?200025 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. Tue, 09 Jan 2007 19:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rayiner) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?200360 http://osnews.com/thread?200360 "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 Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (viton) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?200417 http://osnews.com/thread?200417 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. Wed, 10 Jan 2007 16:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Hank) Comments