YDL v5.0 confirmed for PS3; arriving mid November

[SPM]

This list is very impressive for those not familiar with Linux, but with one exception, these are all just standard parts of a Linux system. That one exception is the Cell SDK 1.1, and I'd sure like to know exactly what's in that. That could be interesting. And although there is nothing new about the window manager Enlightenment 1.7, the fact that it is mentioned so prominently seems to imply that it's working well on the PS3, which implies that X Windows is working, which implies that there is a working X Windows server. That's good, but it could be closed source, and it doesn't necessarily mean that home programmers can call up graphics primitives.

--Greg

I would certainly hope it has a working X-Server without it you would not have a GUI of any kind.

There are three layers on the Linux display system.
1) The X-Window system which is a network client-server architecture. The server part is your display and the client part is the application that wants to display. Basically the X-Window system allows drawing of graphics primitives on the display.

2) The Window Manager like for example Enlightenment. This is a program that sits on top of the X-Window system and manages windows and their attributes. The minimum you need to run a GUI is the X-Server and a Window Manager.

3) The desktop manager eg. KDE or Gnome. These handle cut and paste, drag and drop, the desktop icons, themeing, system tray and various desktop applets.

You also have the Display Manager which is the thing you log into to get a graphical session. It allows you to run multiple sessions on a Linux PC and if you enable it you can get the XDM screen and log in from a remote machine that has an X-Server eg. a Windows PC with Cygwin/XFree86 for Windows installed. The Display Manager handles login and passes a cookie from the X client to the X server so as to provide access control to ensure that only started by that user can display on that screen, and starts an X session.


I haven't come across any closed source X-Server being distributed with any Linux distribution. The open source ones XOrg and XFree86 are a lot better quality and better featured than the proprietary ones, so few if any use the proprietary ones, except for use on Windows.

 

[Zaphod]

It will be freely downloadable, right? They can't charge for anything but distribution costs iirc.

No, they can charge as much as they like for "the physical act of transferring a copy" and/or "offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee". No limit there.

However, the fact that there are limitations to how you might distribute closed source binaries along with GPLed software, and the fact that they have to make the source for said software available, pretty much limits the potential for disproportionate pricing.

To answer the actual question:

How will v5.0 be made available?
Terra Soft will maintain its tradition of a 3-phase product roll-out, starting with delivery via a completely redesigned and rebuilt YDL.net suite of services. Two weeks later, the Terra Soft on-line Store will offer the Install and Source DVDs in a DVD case with printed Guide to Installation, YDL stickers, and the famous YDL Flexible Fliers. Two weeks thereafter, the images will be migrated to the public mirrors.

 

[GregLee]

Again, why would they deviate from what's already been done with Linux on the PS2?

I sure hope they do deviate. I want to see millions of computer users introduced to Linux on the PS3. How many use Linux on the PS2? Maybe a thousand? PS2 Linux is not even distributed anymore by Sony, so far as I know.
--Greg

 

[Asher]

YDL has nothing to do with OS X. OS X is a derivative of Mach and BSD. YDL is a derivative of Redhat Linux. Sony made a mistake IMHO going with a Redhat derived distribution and not an Ubuntu/Debian derived one.

I disagree. YDL is well respected in the high-performance computing circles and already has extensive PowerPC cooperation and support from IBM. IBM deals with three Linux vendors: YDL, RedHat, and SuSE. YDL in particular is very popular in PowerPC clustering computations and has had lots of optimizations in the way of the XL C/C++/Fortran compilers for it.

It makes sense for YDL to work with Sony and IBM on this, if they want to do Cell clusters...

 

[PeterT]

I sure hope they do deviate.

I think they already deviated a whole lot from PS2 Linux in that sense, and positively. What with the built-in hdd, early (launch?) release and public download.

Regarding the earlier discussion of why YDL: I believe it makes a lot of sense, given that it was the most important PPC-focused distro. I guess they were also looking for new opportunities with Apple going X86. I would think their PPC experience helped a lot in getting it up and running (if not perfectly optimized) so fast. [edit] I wrote this before Asher's reply.

I just thought about what this means for emulation: I'd expect pretty much every system before the dreamcast to be emulated just about perfectly (or better than that ) on PS3 in less than a year. Perhaps a bit more grey area - by association - than the Wii alternative, but also a lot more fair for those of us with stacks of SNES and N64 cartridges around.

If this takes off it could also mean a lot for the Enlightenment project, as I'd expect many PS3-specific apps to use the EFL, specifically Edje and Evas, instead of other GUI libs to safe resources (ie. precious RAM). These could in turn be backported to PC and considerably increase the appeal of E. I'm excited to see what all of this will lead to.

 

[Npl]

As a guest of IBM at the annual SC2006 tradeshow, Nov 13-16, Tampa, Florida, Terra Soft will showcase Yellow Dog Linux v5.0, Y-HPC v2.0 beta, and Y-Bio v1.1. Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 for PLAYSTATION 3 will be made available through YDL.net Enhanced accounts, through the Terra Soft on-line Store, retailers, and public mirrors world-wide.

I wonder how installation will work from burned cds. Im pretty sure Sony wont allow every bootable CD/DVDRom to execute even in an "managed process". signed bootsectors & executeables? will they check the whole CD/DVD for modifications?
If its unrestrictive I`d like to see AROS running on it natively

 

[PeterT]

I'd very much expect the installer to be DRM'ed in some way, yes.

 

[mckmas8808]

This list is very impressive for those not familiar with Linux, but with one exception, these are all just standard parts of a Linux system. That one exception is the Cell SDK 1.1, and I'd sure like to know exactly what's in that. That could be interesting. And although there is nothing new about the window manager Enlightenment 1.7, the fact that it is mentioned so prominently seems to imply that it's working well on the PS3, which implies that X Windows is working, which implies that there is a working X Windows server. That's good, but it could be closed source, and it doesn't necessarily mean that home programmers can call up graphics primitives.

--Greg

What is X Windows?

 

[PeterT]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
What is a man?
(Seriously, for topics such as this one you can't beat Wikipedia)

 

[DemoCoder]

Sorry, yes, I realised that later when I had a discussion with someone about this. OS/X obviously couldn't go with Linux because they wanted to be able to shield off some code, which wouldn't have been possible at that time using Linux which requires all code to be released to the public, right?

No, that is not why Apple did not choose Linux. First of all, Linux circa 1996-97 when the decision was made, was alot crappier than BSD. I have been a Unix user for 2 decades, and Linux was a piece of shit back in those days compared to say, FreeBSD/NetBSD. I was always curious why new unix kiddies who installed Linux around that time put up with such a hackneyed system compared to stable, mature open-source BSD systems.

Secondly, Apple acquired NeXTStep and made the decison to base OS X on NeXtSTEP. NeXTStep is a Mach kernel with BSD user-space, and heavy doses of Objective-C based UI layers. Linux had little chance of being Apple's next kernel, Jobs was either going to choose a BSD environment, or BeOS.

On the other hand, for as long as I can recall, YDL has pretty much been the defacto Linux distribution on PPC. Does Ubuntu even offer a PPC port?

Yes, there are tons of PPC distributions. Gentoo, Ubuntu, SUSE, Knoppix.

It makes sense for YDL to work with Sony and IBM on this, if they want to do Cell clusters...

It doesn't make sense for *users*. RPM and Redhat distributions are far harder for endusers to manage than APT based distributions. That's why Ubuntu is so popular now, because RPM is about the worst thing you can choose for a desktop, which is why all "consumer" desktop distributions based on RPM have failed.

As for "optimizations". BFD. Anyone can go buy a commercial license of XLC and rebuild an optimized Linux PPC distribution. People have already hacked XLC to work in other Linux distributions, there is no special magic to make XLC work under say, Ubuntu.

A PS3 Linux should be as user friendly as possible with practically zero administration headache, and IMHO, a distribution built for scientists/engineers to run on clusters is not neccessarily going to meet the needs of endusers. Hell, Sony should have asked Apple to produce an embedded OS X for PS3, then they's get Unix + very nice and slick UI. Both Qt and GTK suck ass as UIs, and neither KDE nor Gnome desktops, with whatever fancy window managers you want to install, paper over the inadequecies of linux desktop apps compared with OS X and XP/Vista.

 

[PeterT]

It doesn't make sense for *users*. RPM and Redhat distributions are far harder for endusers to manage than APT based distributions. That's why Ubuntu is so popular now, because RPM is about the worst thing you can choose for a desktop, which is why all "consumer" desktop distributions based on RPM have failed.

That's not a strong argument in this case. While I'm the first to agree with you when it comes to x86 PC based distros - having gone through RPM hell back in 2000 or so myself - a closed hardware/software platform is quite different. In fact, I believe that the multitude of distributions, with different gcc versions, libc's and sets of libraries out there, and the resulting inability to effectively distribute binaries, has done most of the damage to Linux on the desktop. With PS3 and YDL 5.0 you will be able to target a (hopefully) huge amount of systems with a standardized platform. That alone should make it far less error prone and configuration heavy than anything in PC space.

 

[Asher]

It doesn't make sense for *users*.

Why does Sony care about the users? What they want to do is push Cell and the hype the PS3. Yellow Dog Linux has a high-performance computing version that is used in the real world and will be used in the real world on Cell systems. It is in Sony's best interest for YDL to be used on the PS3 to help develop the ecosystem of high-performance Linux on Cell -- not to mention the development work put into YDL on Cell that's been going on for at least two years already.

This isn't about the users, it's about pushing technology.

As for "optimizations". BFD. Anyone can go buy a commercial license of XLC and rebuild an optimized Linux PPC distribution. People have already hacked XLC to work in other Linux distributions, there is no special magic to make XLC work under say, Ubuntu.

I'm very well aware of that. I'm also very well aware that XLC underwent very substantial changes and additions for Cell that were only developed on, and only tested on, the YDL variant. In fact, that was the entire reason YDL was added to IBM's official support portfolio of XLC in addition to SuSE and RHL...neither SuSE nor RHEL were very interested in excessive work with Cell.

A PS3 Linux should be as user friendly as possible with practically zero administration headache, and IMHO, a distribution built for scientists/engineers to run on clusters is not neccessarily going to meet the needs of endusers. Hell, Sony should have asked Apple to produce an embedded OS X for PS3, then they's get Unix + very nice and slick UI. Both Qt and GTK suck ass as UIs, and neither KDE nor Gnome desktops, with whatever fancy window managers you want to install, paper over the inadequecies of linux desktop apps compared with OS X and XP/Vista.

Again, this is not about the users. If Sony cared about the user experience, you're absolutely right in that a more user-friendly choice would've been more appropriate. But the PS3 isn't about the user experience...it's about pushing Sony's technology in Bluray and in Cell and getting a foothold in the living room. They want you using their default PS3 OS (which I'm sure will evolve) rather than the unpolished Linux OS they'll throw as a bone to us tech geeks.

 

[Rolf N]

To this I will only say that a genuine satisfied user does not cost a company any money. That makes 'em cheaper than marketing drones, which need constant sustainance.

 

[GregLee]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
What is a man?
(Seriously, for topics such as this one you can't beat Wikipedia)

I referred to "X Windows". I have a dim recollection that the X Windows folks do not care for that name. Probably mckmas8808 was commenting on my terminological insensitivity with his question "What is X Windows?".
--Greg

 

[DemoCoder]

Again, this is not about the users.

Well, this time around Sony has all these PR statements about how the PS3 is more than just a game machine, and is actually a home computer. They've been trumpeting it at every major event. If it isn't about the users, then it is about something else: enterprise customers, business-to-business. If that's the case, people getting YDL to run on clusters aren't going to be buying 1,000 PS3 and putting them in a data center, they're going to be buying some kind of CELL workstation, and YDL on PS3 would be irrelevent.

There is only one reason to put YDL on PS3, and it's not for the developers (who have linux devkits anyway) or the HPC people, it's for the endusers.

 

[INKster]

Well, this time around Sony has all these PR statements about how the PS3 is more than just a game machine, and is actually a home computer. They've been trumpeting it at every major event. If it isn't about the users, then it is about something else: enterprise customers, business-to-business. If that's the case, people getting YDL to run on clusters aren't going to be buying 1,000 PS3 and putting them in a data center, they're going to be buying some kind of CELL workstation, and YDL on PS3 would be irrelevent.

There is only one reason to put YDL on PS3, and it's not for the developers (who have linux devkits anyway) or the HPC people, it's for the endusers.

Yeah, but what if you want to code a non-gaming app for a Cell Workstation/Server, and you don't have tens of thousands of dollars to buy them or lease them ?
There's no cheap alternative, other than PS3 (unless you want a dog-slow software-only emulator, like the free one from IBM).

Paying $499 for the console with the chip, knowing that there's a familiar environment/OS suddenly starts to make sense, doesn't it ?
All you need is the distro, and a USB keyboard and mouse.

 

[one]

RPM and Redhat distributions are far harder for endusers to manage than APT based distributions.

Keen users can install apt-rpm later
http://apt-rpm.org/
Probably users of the non-free version YDL can use their one-click installer thing like that in Lindows, well, Linspire...

BTW in the latest Japanese PS3 XMB walkthru in Itmedia, along with the configuration options such as GUI languages and charsets, it has "Installation of Other Systems". The article says it's unknown how it works right now but I guess it's for Linux (and others.)

http://plusd.itmedia.co.jp/games/articles/0610/18/news008_3.html

 

[Crossbar]

There is only one reason to put YDL on PS3, and it's not for the developers (who have linux devkits anyway) or the HPC people, it's for the endusers.

I think you are right. It´s about attacking MS at their home turf. Remember Kutaragi characterized Microsoft as their main competetitor already back in 1994 (link).

 

[SPM]

If that's the case, people getting YDL to run on clusters aren't going to be buying 1,000 PS3 and putting them in a data center, they're going to be buying some kind of CELL workstation, and YDL on PS3 would be irrelevent.

There is only one reason to put YDL on PS3, and it's not for the developers (who have linux devkits anyway) or the HPC people, it's for the endusers.

I have to agree. Rigging together three or four PS3s at home to experiment with a Beowulf clustering is possible, as is doing the same with a number of PCs, is possible for the tiny number of geeks might be so inclined, but neither option is practical for real usage. For a start you want a larger number of nodes and you don't want a tangle of cables to trip over when walking through the racks. There is also a lot in the PS3 which is redundant eg. the RSX, the BD drive etc. so you get more power consumption and heat. This means higher power costs, higher air conditioning costs, and lower density than blade servers will mean lower floor space rental. Professional users will happily pay for higher blade server purchase costs to offset the much higher running costs of PS3s and PCs.

Just to put things into perspective, the world's current fastest supercomputer is supposed to gave 130,000 cpus. If you used a PC which consumed 300w for each, the power consumption would be 39MW, and would require a huge airconditioned building to house it.

Sony may well be experimenting with some sort of parrellel game server cluster using PS3s for gaming applications, but if such a thing does come to fruition, then Sony will be using PS3 blades for production use.

In the last gen, Sony sold the PS2 Linux only as a means of getting geeks in the Linux community interested in the PS2 hardware so that they might be attracted into a career as a games programmer.

Sony is marketing PS3 Linux mainly to provide added value to justify the price - which is something they have to do to sell it against the cheaper competitors. Linux programmer geeks are also targets, but they are a tiny proportion of those to whom PS3 Linux is directed.

 

[Titanio]

There is also a lot in the PS3 which is redundant eg. the RSX, the BD drive etc. so you get more power consumption and heat.

Depending on the app you could maybe make use of RSX for some processing (and the nice fat bandwidth between cpu and gpu might help with some performance pitfalls that'd be of concern with GPGPU on the same chip in a PC, thinking about it)..but if it's not in use, I hope the power management is clever enough so that it doesn't waste too much power if the chip is relatively inactive.