PS3 Linux Install - 'how to' (FC5 up and running now!)

[Skrying]

Is this real?

Maybe not in that specific case. But doing emulation on other consoles is been done way before the PS3. Check out Zophar's Domain for completely legal emulators for many various consoles and PC operating systems.

 

[Npl]

Is this real?

I dunno why it shouldnt? PPC-Linux Emus should run unmodified and Im sure the PS3 could handle the mighty power of NES.

 

[Xpuntar]

Have anyone tried VLC media player (Fedora one)?

I would really like to know how that media player performs on PS3.

 

[Nesh]

Since there is a reference to media players, is there a way you can play WMV and WMA files on the PS3?

 

[StefanS]

Since there is a reference to media players, is there a way you can play WMV and WMA files on the PS3?

Since they can be played on Linux to some extent, it should work on PS3 as well. The WMA works really good, however, the WMVs encoded in the newst versions always create problems. So in principle, yes, but it's far from perfect.

 

[Titanio]

Have anyone tried VLC media player (Fedora one)?

I would really like to know how that media player performs on PS3.

I haven't seen anyone report on it yet, but I'm sure someone will try it shortly.

Regarding performance, bear in mind that it will only be running on the PPE for now. Unless recompiled with a gcc with cell support the build also won't be very suited to the PPE (the compiler that builds general PPC versions of software won't be taking into account Cell's in-order nature or branching characteristics etc.). Still, I'm curious also.

 

[Smak]

NES emulator on PS3....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIWwcGCI_nY

good times!!

 

[zed]

Paging virtual memory managers are frowned upon in realtime systems such as consoles, because you lose predictability. Games will likely use the HD to explicitly cache data, not to create a swap file and allocate away.

this is correct but its always better to have an option than not have it
in certain cases with correct use it should hardly effect performance at all ( from my own experience )
the benifits of having larger ram are huge

 

[22psi]

NES emulator on PS3....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIWwcGCI_nY

good times!!

pretty awesome!

 

[one]

Props to this guy who managed to run Windows XP on QEMU on PS3 :smile:

 

[rounin]

Nice ! 720p doesn't seem too bad after all. Can you post a link to what he did / what hes doing with it?

 

[DieH@rd]

Props to this guy who managed to run Windows XP on QEMU on PS3 :smile:

Kudos to him! Im interested what is the preformance of that emulation... I've never tried anything like that before...

 

[bobthebub]

Props to this guy who managed to run Windows XP on QEMU on PS3 :smile:

Thanks one

Are you able to say if there is anything interesting on this page
http://rian.s26.xrea.com/

Seems to have a Dhrystone benchmark 3485.742
guess that's just for the PPE, how would that compare with other PPC cores?

 

[patsu]

Nope... 3485.742 Dhrystones was achieved by his home PC. PS3 Linux without SPUs achieved only 1361.608.

Fedora Core 5 seems unstable (causing USB keyboard issues). The author hopes/rechons that YDL will perform better and more stable.

EDIT: Disclaimer -- My Japanese is not that good. So it'd be great if someone can confirm too

 

[one]

Nope... 3485.742 Dhrystones was achieved by his home PC. PS3 Linux without SPUs achieved only 1361.608.

Fedora Core 5 seems unstable (causing USB keyboard issues). The author hopes/rechons that YDL will perform better and more stable.

Yes that's what he writes!

To make QEMU and other applications more useful, SPE optimization is essential. I think the only reason why SCE help people to try Linux on PS3 is they want to encourage programs optimized for SPEs, so which distribution/OS people run on PS3 doesn't matter for them.

 

[StefanS]

Nope... 3485.742 Dhrystones was achieved by his home PC. PS3 Linux without SPUs achieved only 1361.608.

Fedora Core 5 seems unstable (causing USB keyboard issues). The author hopes/rechons that YDL will perform better and more stable.

EDIT: Disclaimer -- My Japanese is not that good. So it'd be great if someone can confirm too

Yep, that's what he says. Moreover, he had a problem during install, forcing him to reformat the HDD. He also says the install is quite slow due to the small memory.

 

[patsu]

I am hoping that someone will implement this in a PS3 specific distro...
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cell/

Besides the Virtual File System concept, they also implemented...

SPU library abstraction

Library interfaces

A portable library interface has been established on top of that low-level programming model. The library interface does not rely on implementation details of the file system, but can also be used on other operating systems that might have a different kernel interface.

Instead of providing an abstraction of logical SPUs, this interface is thread-oriented and behaves in a similar way to the pthread library. When an SPU thread gets created, the library will create a new thread that manages the SPU context asynchronous to the main thread.

Library calls from an SPU

When the SPU needs to do any standard library calls like printf or exit, it has to call back to the main thread. It does so by executing the special stop-and-signal assembly instruction with a standardized argument value. That value is returned from the ioctl call and the user thread must react to that. This usually means copying the arguments over from the SPE local store, running the respective library function in the user thread, and continuing by calling the ioctl again.

Direct systems calls from an SPU

We are thinking about adding a direct system call mechanism to the spufs, where the stop-and-signal instruction does not trap into userspace but instead causes the kernel to read the system call arguments from local store and enter the system call directly.

Because this happens inside the ioctl system call of a user process, any pointer arguments to the SPU system call are assumed to point into the address space of that process, and the SPU program needs to use DMA to access them.

 

[Nesh]

Props to this guy who managed to run Windows XP on QEMU on PS3 :smile:

So you can run XP on the PS3 too?
And what is this QEMU you speak of?

NES emulator on PS3....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIWwcGCI_nY

good times!!

Thats actually some of the best things I ve heard about it. An emulator for genesis and SNES games would make things even better

 

[Sankari]

So you can run XP on the PS3 too?
And what is this QEMU you speak of?





Thats actually some of the best things I ve heard about it. An emulator for genesis and SNES games would make things even better

Is it possible to emulate SNES with PS3 at the moment? I think that would make my day, no doubt about it.

 

[Arwin]

Is it possible to emulate SNES with PS3 at the moment? I think that would make my day, no doubt about it.

Well that should be a piece of cake - almost every possible pre-32bit emulator you can think of already exists for the PSP, and you can bet that all of those are going to be available for Linux on the PS3.