Gentoo on PS3

Message

anhlon · Post by **anhlon** » Sat Dec 02, 2006 9:59 pm

hey marschw, when you say video play back, what type of media did you play? any hi-def videos? i can't wait to get my hand on a ps3 tomorrow and install gentoo on it,

xbox360 2 games (nhl2007 & nfl2007) + 150cdn for a 20gb ps3 ...

tokka · Post by **tokka** » Sun Dec 03, 2006 5:12 pm

OK...

I finally got round to installing Gentoo on my PS3 yesterday:)

I looked at the docs in this thread, but was pretty sure that it would be a hell of a lot simpler than they made it, and yeah well it was - so after being continually asked what I'd done on various IRC channels, I've banged together a page that is pretty well step by step.

If you have never installed Linux/gentoo before it might be a stretch to use my tutorial, but if you know how to use nano and what a fstab file is, then it should be a breeze:)

http://www.daniel.jp/joomla/info/ps3/in ... e-ps3.html

I'm doing a complete emerge -e world at the moment, when I finish that, I'll make a tarball of the entire install and stick it online somewhere, they are always useful to have.

linuxtuxhellsinki · Post by **linuxtuxhellsinki** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 12:58 pm

Is this correct # e2label /dev/sdas2 /

bertaboy · Post by **bertaboy** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 3:02 pm

linuxtuxhellsinki wrote:Is this correct # e2label /dev/sdas2 /

Most likely not, since just above that line he has

Code: Select all

#/dev/BOOT              /boot           ext2            noauto,noatime  1 2
/dev/sda2               /               ext3            noatime         0 1
/dev/sda1               none            swap            sw              0 0

tokka · Post by **tokka** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 4:07 pm

Oops - typo:)

Should be # e2label /dev/sda2 /

As I wrote in the guide, I did the install using a TV, so was retyping the next day for the guide:)

I have a 300MB'ish tarball of my install updated for GCC 4.1.1 which I'll link here as it could save people a crap load of recompiling...

marschw · Post by **marschw** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:35 am

anhlon wrote:hey marschw, when you say video play back, what type of media did you play? any hi-def videos? i can't wait to get my hand on a ps3 tomorrow and install gentoo on it, :) xbox360 2 games (nhl2007 & nfl2007) + 150cdn for a 20gb ps3 ...

I'd only tried it with lower-resolution videos at that point, but I just tried some 720p and 1080i videos, and they're pretty choppy. I'm sure this will improve soon -- my CFLAGS are very plain, the fbdev was my -vo option, etc -- especially if we end up seeing things like an mplayer that makes use of the spus.

tokka · Post by **tokka** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:04 am

OK.

http://www.daniel.jp/mtb-data/ps3-mtb-gentoo-01.tar.bz2

is a 339MB tarball of my first Gentoo PS3 install. It includes GCC 4.1.1 and glibc-2.4-r4 and has had a emerge -e system/world, so saving you about 24 hours compiling:)

Just follow the first part of my howto, and use my tarball instead of the stage 3 - and if you can't be bothered to chroot, the root password is gentoo.

Gendal · Post by **Gendal** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:08 am

tokka wrote:OK.

http://www.daniel.jp/mtb-data/ps3-mtb-gentoo-01.tar.bz2

is a 339MB tarball of my first Gentoo PS3 install. It includes GCC 4.1.1 and glibc-2.4-r4 and has had a emerge -e system/world, so saving you about 24 hours compiling:)

Just follow the first part of my howto, and use my tarball instead of the stage 3 - and if you can't be bothered to chroot, the root password is gentoo.

Thanks for the tarball and the write up, I briefly had gentoo running on the ps3 but it was pretty half assed. I didn't know how to configure kboot, the new kernel, etc. If I use the tarball, does that auto set the profile to gcc 4.1.1? Not entirely sure how to do that, but then again I haven't really tried so hopefully it's not too arcane.

The one thing I really want to do is use the PS3 for an HDTV mythtv frontend. I know the cell could eventually be used to playback just about anything after optimizations, but the generic fb video driver we have to use sounds like it pretty much shoots that idea down.

tokka · Post by **tokka** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 10:02 am

Gendal wrote: If I use the tarball, does that auto set the profile to gcc 4.1.1?

In the tarball the profile is already set to ppc64-gcc-4.1.1. It's simply my backup copy of my install before I started compiling X and gnome (minus /usr/portage) - so it includes the PS3 utility apps.

Gendal wrote: The one thing I really want to do is use the PS3 for an HDTV mythtv frontend. I know the cell could eventually be used to playback just about anything after optimizations, but the generic fb video driver we have to use sounds like it pretty much shoots that idea down.

I dunno about that, later on today I'll get vlc compiled with altivec support and I'll try playing a couple of the 1080p avc files from the PS3 online store - amusingly QT7 can't play them full speed on my companies G5 in the video edit suite, but VLC does a good job on pretty standard AMD hardware:)

marschw · Post by **marschw** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 5:06 pm

tokka wrote:
Gendal wrote: If I use the tarball, does that auto set the profile to gcc 4.1.1?
In the tarball the profile is already set to ppc64-gcc-4.1.1. It's simply my backup copy of my install before I started compiling X and gnome (minus /usr/portage) - so it includes the PS3 utility apps.

Gendal wrote: The one thing I really want to do is use the PS3 for an HDTV mythtv frontend. I know the cell could eventually be used to playback just about anything after optimizations, but the generic fb video driver we have to use sounds like it pretty much shoots that idea down.
I dunno about that, later on today I'll get vlc compiled with altivec support and I'll try playing a couple of the 1080p avc files from the PS3 online store - amusingly QT7 can't play them full speed on my companies G5 in the video edit suite, but VLC does a good job on pretty standard AMD hardware:)

I wouldn't bet on it, I've tried 720p mpeg2 files (and avc and 1080i), and they're all awfully choppy. Update from my earlier post, I've tried sdl, fbdev2, fbdev, and x11 as output devices, and they're all about equally choppy. The CPU gets maxed out (in userspace) by the mplayer process.

Note, however, that I haven't played with optimization of mplayer (and other things) yet. My CFLAGS are CFLAGS="-Os -pipe -mno-multiple -mno-update". I picked Os instead of O2 or O3 since I'm expecting the 256MB of RAM to be a much bigger limitation than computational power, and the -mno-multiple and -mno-update are to avoid microcoded instructions (which apparently have a much larger impact on Cell than on other PPC64 CPUs).

tokka · Post by **tokka** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 9:01 pm

Yup, VLC has been a dissapoinment...

After two days of compiling I have Gnome 2.14 running on my PS3, and it seems to run very well indeed:)
After scare stories about it taking 30 seconds to open a terminal window on FC5 I was prepared for the worst, but it's very snappy:)

nikodll · Post by **nikodll** » Thu Dec 07, 2006 10:32 am

Thank you for your posts here about experience with ps3!
what driver do you use now for X? vesa?
can you pls run a glxgears test app and to post here the results on ps3? and also, can you be so kind to measure how these results are changes after running a few parallel glxgears? It's very interesting to know about multithread perfomance on cell now...

zerojay · Post by **zerojay** » Thu Dec 07, 2006 3:41 pm

There's no point in running glxgears because there is no 3d acceleration. Because there is no direct access to the graphics card, we can't have 3d acceleration, and X uses the fbcon driver.

nikodll · Post by **nikodll** » Thu Dec 07, 2006 3:56 pm

even without 3d acceleration, its interesting to see the perfomance - in pure software mode. Especially in comparing with the results of the same app running in few threads.
Besides, there is no chance to achieve the direct access to graphics card? is it completely isolated from the some virtual thread where linux is working or its just a matter of time?

Neurobrainy · Post by **Neurobrainy** » Thu Dec 07, 2006 4:21 pm

nikodll wrote: Besides, there is no chance to achieve the direct access to graphics card? is it completely isolated from the some virtual thread where linux is working or its just a matter of time?

locks
It is say that the graphic card is virtualised like all other hardware in PS3 via a hypervisor. The hypervisor blocks the direct access to the graphic card. I think they do it because of game licencing. A PS3 seems to be not interesting for Open Source gaming without 3d support. They want you to buy thier games and not to programm your own

tokka · Post by **tokka** » Thu Dec 07, 2006 11:07 pm

Neurobrainy wrote:I think they do it because of game licencing. A PS3 seems to be not interesting for Open Source gaming without 3d support. They want you to buy thier games and not to programm your own

That's complete rubbish and I'm getting bored of hearing it. The reason for the lack of GPU support is simply due to time constraints. Period. End of story.

Option B was for SCE to make the alt OS install option ready when they had GPU support - and no linux fun for us in the mean time.

They made the right decision.

Anyway, something requested by a few (lazy) people running a quick install based off my tarball:

http://www.daniel.jp/mtb-data/xorg.conf

clintar · Post by **clintar** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 1:42 am

I've heard multiple people say that access to the video, at least 2d acceleration is planned from Sony, but I've not read anything from them directly. I just want to know for sure. Have you got a link? Otherwise, this isn't very useful to me. By the way, I was going to suggest you mention some way to re-read the partition table after creating partitions since I couldn't mkfs after creating, but I found running udevstart did reread the partition tables after creating the partitions. You might want to add that or whatever the normal way is. The write-up was very well done, though, and I am at a gcc-4.1.1 install now, too, after changing the profile. Wow, if anyone wants to install MythTV, you may want to see if you can find a quickpkg of it. One file it compiles takes about all night swapping like mad because it needs way too much memory to compile, but mine finally got done after leaving it overnight. Maybe I can put up the quickpkg tarball somewhere. Also, anyone know of anyone making optimizations for Cell to make use of the SPUs? In particular, for mplayer or xine? Oh, and can they be used in the kernel? Anyone else that followed tokka's howto, check the http://whitesanjuro.googlepages.com/home page for the instructions on how to compile the other support utilities from the cdrom image.

Neurobrainy · Post by **Neurobrainy** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 1:58 am

tokka wrote:
Neurobrainy wrote:I think they do it because of game licencing. A PS3 seems to be not interesting for Open Source gaming without 3d support. They want you to buy thier games and not to programm your own
That's complete rubbish and I'm getting bored of hearing it. The reason for the lack of GPU support is simply due to time constraints. Period. End of story.

Option B was for SCE to make the alt OS install option ready when they had GPU support - and no linux fun for us in the mean time.

They made the right decision.

Anyway, something requested by a few (lazy) people running a quick install based off my tarball:

http://www.daniel.jp/mtb-data/xorg.conf

That, sounds interesting, but i can not follow your thoughts. It is said that the GPU, except from the framebuffer, is blocked by the hypervisor. I can't tell you the reason for this, but being short in time seem to be an interesting reason to block a hardware component for alternative OSs. The GPU seem to work pretty well on the PS3-own-OS. The GPU itself will not change during the next time, so i cant see the reason why to block it now. The kboot loader( which is from my point of view the real alt OS install option) should be independent from the GPU driver implementation. I really hope they can fix the hypervisor via firmware updates....and i hope they will do it until it is published in spring here in Europe

Please, please correct me, if i am wrong, but please give me a real good reason. i don't have this beast yet.
But by the way can anyone tell us guys here in Europe anything about the spu scalability/multithread support(nikodll's glxgears might be cool), the gcc autovectorization and the power saving options on this maschine.
Best wishes to tame this monster!!!

tokka · Post by **tokka** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 12:40 pm

Neurobrainy wrote: That, sounds interesting, but i can not follow your thoughts. It is said that the GPU, except from the framebuffer, is blocked by the hypervisor. I can't tell you the reason for this, but being short in time seem to be an interesting reason to block a hardware component for alternative OSs.

Think of it as access not being enabled rather than blocked.

Look if you want to take this further ask me on IRC.

There is no GPU access, lets move on eh?

tokka · Post by **tokka** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 12:57 pm

clintar wrote:By the way, I was going to suggest you mention some way to re-read the partition table after creating partitions since I couldn't mkfs after creating, but I found running udevstart did reread the partition tables after creating the partitions.

Oops, thanks, i missed that - again from writing the guide from memory the day after the event:) I actually was lazy and simply restarted the machine - used to fdisk nagging for a reboot:)

clintar wrote:Wow, if anyone wants to install MythTV, you may want to see if you can find a quickpkg of it. One file it compiles takes about all night swapping like mad because it needs way too much memory to compile, but mine finally got done after leaving it overnight. Maybe I can put up the quickpkg tarball somewhere.

Yeah, I thought about quickpkg's of the entire Gnome install, but I'm not too sure of the politics involved, it seems kind of un-Gentoo like:)

Is a PS3 binary repository a good idea?

I might just make a second tarball of a Gnome install, but the livecd idea seems to be gathering pace so I'll see what they need a hand with over the weekend, maybe that will make a Gnome tarball redundant.

clintar wrote:Also, anyone know of anyone making optimizations for Cell to make use of the SPUs? In particular, for mplayer or xine?

No nothing so far, especially for ffmpeg which of course effects most other media apps. I wonder if it might be worth offering access to our PS3's to key ffmpeg developers as I expect most are based in Europe.

anunakin · Post by **anunakin** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 3:28 pm

tokka wrote:
clintar wrote:By the way, I was going to suggest you mention some way to re-read the partition table after creating partitions since I couldn't mkfs after creating, but I found running udevstart did reread the partition tables after creating the partitions.
Oops, thanks, i missed that - again from writing the guide from memory the day after the event:) I actually was lazy and simply restarted the machine - used to fdisk nagging for a reboot:)

clintar wrote:Wow, if anyone wants to install MythTV, you may want to see if you can find a quickpkg of it. One file it compiles takes about all night swapping like mad because it needs way too much memory to compile, but mine finally got done after leaving it overnight. Maybe I can put up the quickpkg tarball somewhere.
Yeah, I thought about quickpkg's of the entire Gnome install, but I'm not too sure of the politics involved, it seems kind of un-Gentoo like:)

Is a PS3 binary repository a good idea?

I might just make a second tarball of a Gnome install, but the livecd idea seems to be gathering pace so I'll see what they need a hand with over the weekend, maybe that will make a Gnome tarball redundant.

clintar wrote:Also, anyone know of anyone making optimizations for Cell to make use of the SPUs? In particular, for mplayer or xine?
No nothing so far, especially for ffmpeg which of course effects most other media apps. I wonder if it might be worth offering access to our PS3's to key ffmpeg developers as I expect most are based in Europe.

I think a nice idea todo a binary repository for PS3....

I found a japanese site where the guys still testing many CFLAGS, with ffmpeg....
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/hagecell/

marschw · Post by **marschw** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 5:43 pm

anunakin wrote:I found a japanese site where the guys still testing many CFLAGS, with ffmpeg....
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/hagecell/

Great link, thanks. The results look somewhat discouraging, however -- as best as I can tell, having no CFLAGS at all produced very nearly the best results. "-O3 -funroll-loops -m32" was only slightly faster, and "-O3" was actually slower...

It was encouraging to see that performance was quite substantially better when he tried IBM's cell compiler. But, as he pointed out, its lowest price is $500 US...

Shai Hulud · Post by **Shai Hulud** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 12:22 am

tokka wrote:Yup, VLC has been a dissapoinment...

After two days of compiling I have Gnome 2.14 running on my PS3, and it seems to run very well indeed:)
After scare stories about it taking 30 seconds to open a terminal window on FC5 I was prepared for the worst, but it's very snappy:)

tokka,
Would you be willing to post a revised tarball w/ Gnome 2.14 included? If so, much thanks and appreciation!

On the Seti@Home forum, a few individuals are working to port BOINC and S@H client to PS3.
So far, one gent has sucessfully compiled BOINC and S@H to run on PS3 w/ Yellow Dog, though very slowly.
Does Gentoo support the altivec capability of the PPE? Any ideas to gain this functionality? Does Gentoo offer a better potential starting point than YD or FC 5 in this regard? A couple optimizers have used Gentoo in the past to create optimized S@H applications for standard intel-based platforms. PS3 w/ PPC and altivec of course is a completely different animal. Any ideas or pointers from your experience is much appreciated

BTW, have you had any sucess w/ SPEs?

best regards.

nickthecook · Post by **nickthecook** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 4:52 am

I was surfing while waiting for my full FC5 install to complete on my ps3, and I found a link to your howto on this forum.

I've installed many different distros since I first tried Gentoo, and they never seem to last more than a week, but this set a record - FC5 lasted about 90 seconds, just long enough for me to get into fdisk from kboot.

Your guide was great! I'm up and running with my Gentoo install now, however as you mentioned at the bottom of your guide, one should update one's profile to use GCC 4, and I'm in the middle of (re)compiling gcc and glibc. I get errors such as "/sbin/boot-game-os: line 3: /sbin/other-os-flash-util: Accessing a corrupted shared library" and hopefully this will take care of it.

Anyway, keep up the good work, and if you need any help with anything, such as testing, let me know and I'll do my best! I'm very interested in seeing Gentoo on PS3 become a stable, fully-functional platform.

Thanks again!

anhlon · Post by **anhlon** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 7:00 am

erm...some help please.

just installed xfce4 and when i try to test the xorg server (startx) black screen

tried using xorgcfg to auto generate the xorg.conf file and the one tokka posted, no luck. i'm using the hdmi cable to a lcd tv.

any ideas?

thanks

Gentoo on PS3

perfomance

Thank you tokka!