It looks like it's EOL. Can they not merge their changes upstream?
Someone did a port to a newer Linux base, and upstreaming is in progress: https://github.com/frno7/linux
Linux for Playstation 2
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: Linux for Playstation 2
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (it also being primarily a vehicle for piracy certainly didn't help). The piracy hacks never used OtherOS. The first piracy hack (the PSJailbreak dongle exploit) simply exploited the GameOS usb stack and wasn't released until after OtherOS had already been removed in a firmware update. The only hack that ever targeted OtherOS was a complex memory glitching attack that was pretty hard to pull off. As far as I'm awar…
I recall there was something involving Other OS and soldering a wire into the motherboard.
It was one of the first ways I could rip a bluray, though
Re: Linux for Playstation 2
#33Related, NetBSD had[0] a port for ps2 at some point.
Re: Linux for Playstation 2
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should have sold a datacenter version, without the optical disc, with a copy of AIX and/or BSD, with an OS license of $200 (or at least under $1,000). It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just blades and embedded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
A hypothetical Datacenter version might have skipped the optical drive, perhaps cutting down on their losses. At launch I doubt they would have had enough spare processors to build them without cutting into their PS3 production capacity. Additionally many game studios reported difficulty in writing for the PS3's processor compared to the Xbox, which had gone with a processor pretty similar to most PCs at the time. So…
Sony should have realized that the Cell/Power was needed in great quantity, and insisted upon a second supplier. Motorola started making the PowerPC 601 in 1992, so a secondary foundry was absolutely available.
From the wiki: "The introductory design is fabricated using a 90 nm SOI process, with initial volume production slated for IBM's facility in East Fishkill, New York."
AMD did this for Intel up to the 286. Sony should have insisted upon a tidal wave of wafers, if needed.
Re: Linux for Playstation 2
#35It was a great indie development community, gaining experience on what it meant a console like dev experience, sadly spoiled by tons of folks porting emulators instead of being creative. Most like the reasoning behind PS3 Linux no longer having GPU libraries like the PS2Linux, only 2D acceleration, and eventually migration to FreeBSD as basis for PlayStation OS from PS4 onwards. Still have my PS2Linux kit.
> tons of folks porting emulators instead of being creative On one hand this is something that annoys me a bit to this day - i am into original xbox homebrew games (bought a modded one last year specifically for this) and pretty much 99.999% of the homebrew software is emulators. While i can see the point until around mid-2000s due to the available hardware back then, emulators are by far the main target for any jail…
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Re: Linux for Playstation 2
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the PlayStation 3, another thing driving Linux's removal was that organizations were buying PS3s to use in data centers. But Sony sold them at a loss (IIRC over $100/unit loss, even being sold at $600 twenty years ago) and intended to make it up on revenue from games sold. They also didn't have nearly enough at launch because they were using a brand new processor (designed with help from IBM) and a brand new Blu-…
They should have sold a datacenter version, without the optical disc, with a copy of AIX and/or BSD, with an OS license of $200 (or at least under $1,000). It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just blades and embedded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
IBM sold that as BladeCenter QS series. Reportendly there even was an prototype version that had essentially same hardware as PS3 including the optical drive (production ones are dual-CPU without GPU and optical drive).
Re: Linux for Playstation 2
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should have sold a datacenter version, without the optical disc, with a copy of AIX and/or BSD, with an OS license of $200 (or at least under $1,000). It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just blades and embedded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
A hypothetical Datacenter version might have skipped the optical drive, perhaps cutting down on their losses. At launch I doubt they would have had enough spare processors to build them without cutting into their PS3 production capacity. Additionally many game studios reported difficulty in writing for the PS3's processor compared to the Xbox, which had gone with a processor pretty similar to most PCs at the time. So…
Cell used the PowerPC isa as did the Xbox 360. Both were designed in the same IBM facility but separated by a floor. IIRC the Xbox team indirectly learned from the Cell team's mistakes at the process/microarch level.
Cell was definitely more weird to code against and Sony put max theoretical perf above Xbox's approach to be more general purpose chip architecture. So strictly speaking it wasn't like most PCs at the time in the x86 sense but in the three mostly same cores for Xbox vs custom Cell and special ways to squeeze out performance.
Re: Linux for Playstation 2
#38It was a great indie development community, gaining experience on what it meant a console like dev experience, sadly spoiled by tons of folks porting emulators instead of being creative. Most like the reasoning behind PS3 Linux no longer having GPU libraries like the PS2Linux, only 2D acceleration, and eventually migration to FreeBSD as basis for PlayStation OS from PS4 onwards. Still have my PS2Linux kit.
The PS3 also ran FreeBSD as its base OS
Re: Linux for Playstation 2
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should have sold a datacenter version, without the optical disc, with a copy of AIX and/or BSD, with an OS license of $200 (or at least under $1,000). It doesn't look like a workstation was ever produced, just blades and embedded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
IBM sold that as BladeCenter QS series. Reportendly there even was an prototype version that had essentially same hardware as PS3 including the optical drive (production ones are dual-CPU without GPU and optical drive).
FWIW, early designs for the PS3 also were missing the GPU in lieu of another Cell chip. The end of Dennard scaling meant that they didn't hit the clock speed they originally intended (close to 5Ghz). It was originally supposed to do rasterization in software on that second cell, but relatively in the last minute they needed to strap a dedicated GPU to it. That's why Cell reads out of VRAM are incredibly slow, around 16MB/s.
Re: Linux for Playstation 2
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
A hypothetical Datacenter version might have skipped the optical drive, perhaps cutting down on their losses. At launch I doubt they would have had enough spare processors to build them without cutting into their PS3 production capacity. Additionally many game studios reported difficulty in writing for the PS3's processor compared to the Xbox, which had gone with a processor pretty similar to most PCs at the time. So…
Cell used the PowerPC isa as did the Xbox 360. Both were designed in the same IBM facility but separated by a floor. IIRC the Xbox team indirectly learned from the Cell team's mistakes at the process/microarch level. Cell was definitely more weird to code against and Sony put max theoretical perf above Xbox's approach to be more general purpose chip architecture. So strictly speaking it wasn't like most PCs at the ti…
Sort of. The xenon cores are pretty damn close to cell PPE cores, just with VMX-128 strapped to them. They even share some taped out blocks, and have almost all of the same microarchitectural issues like the load hit store penalty.