What's the state of PS3 Linux Cell development?

http://wiki.ps2dev.org/ps3:spu-medialib

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cellbuzz/

I'm currently working on a realtime renderer, nothing fancy yet, hopefully I'll have something to show by the end of next week.

 

I haven't heard much on PS3 specific Linux development (since the SIXAXIS robot and PS3 Bootloader). It seems that people are still working on it (e.g., http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2007-May/028866.html).

There is also a continuous stream of information from the scientific and business community:

Recent material I found include:

* March 2007: GRID superscalar: from the Grid to the Cell processor: Parallal programming model ported to Cell...
http://webrt.ciemat.es:8000/docs/e-science/Perez.pdf

* June 2007: An Open Source Environment for Cell Broadband Engine System Software : Yet another overview... (I think)
http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/.../co/2007/06/r6toc.xml&DOI=10.1109/MC.2007.192

This one I missed last time:

* Technology Enables More Reliable, Less Expensive Oil Exploration In Gulf of Mexico:
http://www.cell-processor.net/news.php?extend.54

EDIT:
Applaud at OzzyBC42's post.

 

I really should install Linux on my PS3 sometime. It'd be awesome to play around with the Cell a little, even if I'll never be able to do something incredibly fancy. Just fun to see if I can get something going at all. I've really just let all my time slip away playing with the damn thing ... (not that much time either, I finished Super Rub-a-Duck, and last Friday Resistance SP, and now I'm working through the Stardust planets).

I'd love to try and get something going though! Thanks for sharing that, Ozzy.

 

running 'yum update' right now!

 

Does anything like this exist ? :- To port existing code we'd created a load of templated wrapped pointers & iterators to abstract dma-ing to LS and stepping through data*; and at the top level something like a 'PAR_ForEach'... with a few defines to map the glue for loop bodies compiled on SPU/or SMP threads. I'd posted some questions about this on the ibm forums.

It was done from the point of view of crossplatform development; i.e. running one code path between generic SMP and SPU's. I had the option of emulating LS on the 360 for ease of debugging. So next time round we just have a load of templates people can map to and it makes an SPU port a lot easier.

I imagine most game developpers would have had to do something similar, and it would be in sti's interest to just give out such code...

Setting it all up was great fun but if it existed externally, all documented etc it would be easier to get coders to use it. (and to lose their fear of this great processor)

Another thing I was working through/looking for was emulation of SPU intrinsics on other platforms.. (and vica versa) to help writing helpers for branchless code. (Gets easier with SSE4.)

Unfortunately I can't spend as much time on pure SPU optimized cases as id' like - but i'm finding a lot of common ground is possible between what I'd describe as 'cutting edge' 360 code & spu code.

 

Question: how well would sometihng like Open Office perform on a PS3? My mother is tihnking of getting one and installing Linux on it instead of messing around with PCs. She's a writer, and needs something like Open Office to do her work.

 

Open Office comes pre-installed with most every present version of PS3 compatible Linux distros. It works fine, so for emailing docs and other basic purposes, you'd be good to go. Remember that as a PC replacement, the PS3 does suffer from some minor limitations, and you'll have to make pains to make sure that any peripherals are USB and supported.

Shifty's right though, general usability questions of that nature aren't the thrust of the thread.

 

spu2vmx, si2vmx

There are spu to vmx (altivec) wrappers available. Called spu2vmx.h and si2vmx.h -- both part of the standard IBM install. These can be helpful to test our your spu code logic on the PPU (or on any PowerPC with Altivec support), if that's easier for you.

I know quite a lot of people have written spu to c-scalar code wrappers as well, but I haven't seen any out in the wild.

Mike.

 

Flash on anything other than x86?

Flash still hasn't got proper PowerPC support - so I don't expect that Cell is high on their priority list.

 

I've got a wave shaper working on an SPE. A single SPE can do > 300 million samples per second with 42 instructions in the loop. That's 30X faster than the standard PPE version (scalar, non-unrolled).

The PPE AltiVec version is currently getting scores very close to the SPE. I've only just got it running so I may be able to change that. I suspect changing to HPFS will produce a difference.

 

It's over a year since this post.

Someone posted an update on the cbe-oss-dev mailing list: http://ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-dev/2008-August/005406.html

http://ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-dev/2008-August/005407.html :

 

Yes, for example the Bullet physics library emulates LS and Fake DMA transfers to create portable SPU tasks. Apart from the SPURS version, which is only available for PS3 developers from PS3 Devnet, all source code is available under the Zlib license, free for commercial use from http://bullet.googlecode.com

• Implemented for Bullet collision narrowphase, batch ray tests, constraint solver, see http://code.google.com/p/bullet/source/browse/#svn/trunk/src/BulletMultiThreaded
• Tasks run under SPURS, libspe2, pthreads, Win32 Threads, sequential
• Easier debugging of SPU tasks on other platforms and maintain shared code base
• Emulates 256kb Local Store on non-SPU platforms
• Explicit memory management through (fake) DMA transfers
• Systems that don’t require explicit memory transfers, still benefit
• Also check Emergent Floodgate, Vincent Scheib 2008, http://beautifulpixels.blogspot.com/2008/08/multi-platform-multi-core-architecture.html

It seems a good compromise with reasonable performance on non-SPU platforms and it is easier to maintain than a fork/rewrite for each platform.

 

YDL 6.2 released

http://us.fixstars.com/news/2009/2009-06-29.shtml

 

Should be able to. There was an Ubuntu distro that did it that way.

 

Sounds pretty great. If someone manages to boot this off a thumbstick or something similar let me know, I want to try it as well.

 

I should try to install to thumbdrive, but my PS3 monitor at work has been "stolen" for other purposes.

Meanwhile, some people are gathering to make a PS3 SDK:
http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=12176&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

 

If I hadn't been working with Linux on my new PC so much these days, I would probably forget about it. In fact I was thinking about installing Ubuntu 9.04 on my PS3, and then realised that YellowDog 6.2 should be out now for the public and come with the CellSDK, PS3VRAM and all that pre-installed. So now I'm downloading that. Anyone else going to try this / has tried this already?

I'm not sure yet how I'm going to install this - installing it on my external drive could be good, because then I could basically compare different Linux installs from there much more easily, but I may stick to just using this one, we'll see, and then try that remote session option that I've heard others about.