Gentoo on PS3?

Knorp · Joined: 17 Nov 2006 Posts: 4

I've been hearing some whispering about Gentoo being made available for PS3? Sony has opened their Open Platform webpage with instructions for installing another OS on a PS3. You basically put a provided Sony installer and a third party bootloader on a USB key, plug it into your PS3, and then use the built-in utility to "install other os".

See here for detailed instructions:

http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html

Is there any way to put Gentoo on it now, or will more info be made available shortly?

Marcel Unbehaun · Joined: 24 Sep 2004 Posts: 297

Hi Knorp!
lu-zero just put new (masked) cell-sources into portage :
http://packages.gentoo.org/ebuilds/?cell-sources-2.6.19_rc6-r1

Luca Barbato · Joined: 18 Nov 2004 Posts: 109

the quickest way to get it running is just fetch or produce a standard stage3 image, add a default kernel for ps3 (the latest cell-sources should do) and it should work. (if you have a powerpc or a ppc64 would be easy since you can chroot inside)

I'm not 100% sure since I don't have access to a system...

Currently I'm trying to update the toolchain snapshots to let people start using spus and ppu specific instruction scheduling since running generic or g5 tuned binaries could lead you to a delusion ^^ (it could be quite slow due misses, pipeline bubbles and other stuff you can avoid compiling for the cell target)

I'll try to prepare a quick recipe to let you play at the earliest, give me at least a day or two to be more sure.

ping me on irc in few ours (since I have to do something in this evening and I won't available now) or send me an email if you want to act as guinea pig (requirements: crossdev, time, patience)

Knorp · Joined: 17 Nov 2006 Posts: 4

Thanks for the replies! I'm a bit of a noob here, so I'm not sure how much help I can be. I'll be getting my PS3 in a couple of days.

Joseph Jezak · Joined: 01 Feb 2006 Posts: 32

Sort of. We had a user show up in #gentoo-ppc64 on freenode today with a PS3 and the desire to run Gentoo. :) Here's the gist of what we ended up doing. Since I don't have a PS3 yet, I can't give you more details, but if you join #gentoo-ppc64, we'll help you out. :)

Using Sony's bootloader, you boot into a 2.6.16 root with a minimal busybox shell. From here, you should partition, create the filesystems and mount the PS3 hard disk. Once this is complete, copy the Stage3 ppc64 tarball, unpack, chroot in and follow the Gentoo directions for configuring it. Next, you'll need to fetch lu_zero's overlay for Cell/PS3 for the kernel sources, gcc, etc. These should be installed and the kernel configured, compiled, etc. You'll want to recompile things with Cell scheduling instead of the PPC64 generic stages since the PPE really isn't the same as a regular PPC64 machine (no out of order instructions!). As for configuring it to boot, the user left before we got this far, so I can't say at this time.

I'm not sure if it's needed, but the Gentoo PPC64 2006.1 Install CD can be mounted (squashfs support seems to have been included with Sony's kernel) for any missing apps that you might need to set things up.

Hope this helps. :)

Knorp · Joined: 17 Nov 2006 Posts: 4

Sounds slightly complex! I'll be getting my PS3 in the next couple of days, but perhaps I'm too newbie-ish to try this out for you. Perhaps if there was someone to hand-hold me through it it might be possible.

Luca Barbato · Joined: 18 Nov 2004 Posts: 109

http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/lu_zero/wiki/PlaystationNotes

it is just as simple as installing gentoo on any other platform in the end (got someone doing the first steps today)

Hopefully I'll get him doing some pictures of the thing ^^;

in the other news I'm trying to fix newlib and then the only thing missing is a glibc with fixes for "extern inline"

Knorp · Joined: 17 Nov 2006 Posts: 4

Thanks for that lu_zero, I'm a little clearer in my mind now about what needs to be done :) I will hopefully have a chance to spend some time on this this week.

Luca Barbato · Joined: 18 Nov 2004 Posts: 109

at least one guy managed to install gentoo already and I'm helping another getting things build correctly (and in the mean time experiment with stuff)

sugardave · Joined: 27 Nov 2006 Posts: 10

Has anyone else heard anything about Genesi and GentooPPC for the PS3 as referenced in this thread:

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=902

Luca Barbato · Joined: 18 Nov 2004 Posts: 109

they are hosting/mirroring most of the useful stuff you get for the ps3 and we (myself, ranger, josejx as developers and some quite dedicated users and owner of ps3) are doing some work to get things working out of box asap. Currently there are all the bits either from my overlay or the main portage tree and all you need to do is just do a plain install from a ppc/ppc64 stage3 and then emerge the experimental stuff.

Most of the development is currently geared to get overall improved ppc64 support, better hardware support (like a good automatic xorg.conf or provide ebuilds for the experimental .20 and the stable .16) and SPU support (libspe, spu-elf crossdev target)

you could find us around the usual #gentoo- channels

tgall · Joined: 13 Mar 2006 Posts: 4

With a huge thank you to Rangerpb for all his very fine work:

http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/cell/wiki/InstallGentooOnPS3

This install method allows one to use a stage4 which in gentoo parlance means you don't have to build a thing, you start with a very useful system straight from the get go.

Regards,

Tom