For a long time, I was looking for PowerPC machine to run Linux on it. I was planning to buy some PowerBook when I get good offer, but that opportunity never really came.
Playstation 3 hardware
Meantime, Sony has been reducing price of PlayStation 3 up to point where they don't include hyper-visor which is a shame. (also known as Other OS support). If I wanted to run Linux on it, I was running out of time. So, I decided to take a leap of fate and buy one 40Gb (CECHGxx) model for ~240 € which seemed like a good price for PowerPC at 3.2GHz with 256 Mb RAM and slowish disk:
dpavlin@ps3:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 cpu : Cell Broadband Engine, altivec supported clock : 3192.000000MHz revision : 16.0 (pvr 0070 1000) processor : 1 cpu : Cell Broadband Engine, altivec supported clock : 3192.000000MHz revision : 16.0 (pvr 0070 1000) timebase : 79800000 platform : PS3 model : SonyPS3
dpavlin@ps3:~$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 213728 63372 150356 0 2608 25212
-/+ buffers/cache: 35552 178176
Swap: 586332 0 586332
root@ps3:~# hdparm -tT /dev/ps3da /dev/ps3da: Timing cached reads: 1640 MB in 2.00 seconds = 819.90 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 82 MB in 3.02 seconds = 27.17 MB/secYou will not get access to graphic cards, but you can use it's 256 Mb of VRAM (DDR3) as block device, but it's also not very fast:
root@ps3:~# hdparm -tT /dev/ps3vram
/dev/ps3vram:
Timing cached reads: 1682 MB in 2.00 seconds = 841.64 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 96 MB in 3.06 seconds = 31.40 MB/sec
root@ps3:~# dd_rescue -m 236M /dev/zero /dev/ps3vram
Summary for /dev/zero -> /dev/ps3vram:
dd_rescue: (info): ipos: 241664.0k, opos: 241664.0k, xferd: 241664.0k
errs: 0, errxfer: 0.0k, succxfer: 241664.0k
+curr.rate: 15911kB/s, avg.rate: 15669kB/s, avg.load: 7.4%
root@ps3:~# dd_rescue -m 236M /dev/ps3vram /dev/zero
Summary for /dev/ps3vram -> /dev/zero:
dd_rescue: (warning): /dev/zero (241664.0k): Invalid argument!
dd_rescue: (info): ipos: 241664.0k, opos: 241664.0k, xferd: 241664.0k
errs: 0, errxfer: 0.0k, succxfer: 241664.0k
+curr.rate: 32621kB/s, avg.rate: 31898kB/s, avg.load: 14.8%
Normal usage is as swap (with higher priority than disk), but this basically just saves disk from spinning because disk is faster at writing (which you really care about if you are swapping to media) but slower at reading:
root@ps3:~# dd_rescue -m 236M /dev/zero /tmp/disk.speed.test
Summary for /dev/zero -> /tmp/disk.speed.test:
dd_rescue: (info): ipos: 241664.0k, opos: 241664.0k, xferd: 241664.0k
errs: 0, errxfer: 0.0k, succxfer: 241664.0k
+curr.rate: 18400kB/s, avg.rate: 18392kB/s, avg.load: 19.2%
root@ps3:~# dd_rescue -m 236M /dev/zero /tmp/disk.speed.test
Summary for /tmp/disk.speed.test -> /dev/zero:
dd_rescue: (warning): /dev/zero (241664.0k): Invalid argument!
dd_rescue: (info): ipos: 241664.0k, opos: 241664.0k, xferd: 241664.0k
errs: 0, errxfer: 0.0k, succxfer: 241664.0k
+curr.rate: 24036kB/s, avg.rate: 22819kB/s, avg.load: 4.7%
Good news is that USB disks are almost as fast as internal drive:
root@ps3:~# hdparm -tT /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 1740 MB in 2.00 seconds = 870.84 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 72 MB in 3.01 seconds = 23.89 MB/secHaving said that, it's probably one of best machines I saw after my first Alpha :-). It's quiet, all hardware available is supported under Linux and provides great platform for PowerPC development.
Ethernet, on the other hand is fastest way to get data to or from machine:
root@ps3:~# nc -l -p 8888 < /dev/zero
root@t61p:~# nc 192.168.2.103 8888 | dd_rescue -m 1G - /dev/null
Summary for - -> /dev/null:
dd_rescue: (warning): /dev/null (1048576.0k): Invalid argument!
dd_rescue: (info): ipos: 1048576.0k, opos: 1048576.0k, xferd: 1048576.0k
errs: 0, errxfer: 0.0k, succxfer: 1048576.0k
+curr.rate: 0kB/s, avg.rate: 86905kB/s, avg.load: 12.4%
root@t61p:~# nc -l -p 8889 < /dev/zero
root@ps3:~# nc 192.168.2.61 8889 | dd_rescue -m 1G - /dev/null
Summary for - -> /dev/null:
dd_rescue: (warning): /dev/null (1048576.0k): Invalid argument!
dd_rescue: (info): ipos: 1048576.0k, opos: 1048576.0k, xferd: 1048576.0k
errs: 0, errxfer: 0.0k, succxfer: 1048576.0k
+curr.rate: 0kB/s, avg.rate: 68914kB/s, avg.load: 21.2%
What about graphics?
Basic support is frame-buffer in various resolutions over HDMI (I can't really test compost output). ps3-video-mode -m 130 is something you will type often if you are sitting away from your 1920x1200 LCD...
There is sample code to run RSX from 2007, but it doesn't seem it had any changes since then. There is also libps3rsx and video of it looks promising. It's also from 2007. And it seems you need firmware older than 2.10 which I don't have. Forum thread PS3 Development seems to be dead, but RSX page on wiki is nice overview.
Different approach is to use 6 available SPU cores for YUV to ARGB conversions with scaling. There is also patch for console mplayer -vo to enable movie decoding usable under Linux using SPUs. There is Debian packages for xserver-xorg-video-spu but for sid and it doesn't work for me (next step: recompile).
What about cells?
I still don't know. But, following projects also look very interesting:
- MPEG2 Decoder optimized for Cell BE/PS3
- Mesa Cell driver
- SDL support SPEs for Linux framebuffer, scaling, format-conversion and drawing
Debian installation
I tried to install Debian following instructions for squeeze but between fighting with Sony menu (which I didn't like when I saw it first time on PSP) and trying to type of wireless keyboard which had incredibly short repeat key I wasn't successful. So I tried Debian Live for PS3 and it worked. apt-get dist-upgrade and few hours later I had 2.6.31.1 from www.kernel.org working.