Version 5.0.2 of Yellow Dog Linux was recently released. It includes kernel 2.6.22rc4, SDK v2.0 for Cell BE, more than 70 bug fixes and updates, continued support for both 32- and 64-bit systems and has beta IBM ‘System p’ support.
Yellow Dog Linux 5.0.2 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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FYI, it works fine on the ODW, just tested it over the weekend. /rasmus
Any experiences using YDL on a Sony Playstation 3?
pica
SDK2.1 is out several months ago, so why they keep obsolete version?
Anyway, i upgraded YDL5.0 to FC7+windowlab, so i’m not interested in it.
It’s mostly a question of glibc compatibility. YDL 5.0 is based on FC5, which is using an older version of glibc (2.4), while the IBM SDK v2.1 was compiled against FC6, which is using glibc 2.5. Yellow Dog would need to recompile and test the whole SDK 2.1 for the PS3.
Furthermore, the Eclipse SDK plugin coming with the SDK 2.1 needs Eclipse 3.2, while YDL is shipped with a custom version of 3.1 optimised for the limited memory accessible by Linux on the PS3 (less than 230MB due to the framebuffer).
While these tasks aren’t necessarily hard, I guess they are just understaffed for assuring top quality on them.
Well, they are many months behind Fedora.
So i don’t see why anyone should use YDL.
Eclipse is crawling like a dying hourse on PS3 (and on my AMD64/1GB desktop as well)
I use plain textmode editor and gcc.
Nothing to configure, works fast and a lot of memory is available for programs.
I wonder how well would fare a PS3, with YDL running Blender and Yafray/Kerkythea/Indigo for 3D rendering… Anyone knows how does it compare to a current x86 workstation? Do you think the low amount of RAM might be a problem?
Edited 2007-07-09 10:54
I think that Blender would need a hand-made port for PS3 to take advantage of the special features of Cell.
On common applications it is likely to perform very poorly compared to a regular x86 machine. To put to good use this kind of machine you need specialised software, for example it shows a lot of promise for ray-tracing:
http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~benthin/cellrt06.pdf
For real-time stuff it’s also a no-go at the moment AFAIK as there is no documented way to access the GPU from Linux.
The thing is that, I find the PS3 interesting only for rendering. I guess that for 3D modelling it won’t be so nice.
The setup would be a standard x86 workstation with an OpenGL optimized card for 3D modelling and a PS3 just for rendering, so no need for the GPU.
By the way, I just remembered that Indigo and probably Kerkythea wouldn’t work since it is x86, but Yafray may be cool, and if there’s a way to make it use more than one core on multiple core processors, then it mustn’t be difficult to setup it in a PS3 for use as a render workstation taking advantage of the Cell processor which already demonstrated its power in aplications like Folding@home.
Edited 2007-07-09 12:04
I think the tesla solutions of nvidia aren’t that bad either. http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html