[Cbe-oss-dev] help need: cannot boot after FC7 update on PS3

[Robert McGwier]

Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Friday 14 December 2007, Goffredo Marocchi wrote:
>> let's see if I got everything straight ;).
>>
>> If I installed Fedora 8 on a PS3 (I might do it when I change HDD) AND
>>
>> I used the PS3 Kernel compiled from Geoff's git tree AND
>>
>> I installed both ISO's of the CELL SDK 3.0 (the base and the extra ones) 
>> excluding the system simulator and the kernel but including naturally 
>> ppu-* and spu-* packages...
>>
>> Will SDK 3.0 work fine ?
> 
> You have a much better chance using the latest update kernel from Fedora
> than using Geoff's git tree, AFAICT.
> 
> Geoff's tree has newer features and fixes a number of bugs, but the
> official kernel from Fedora is much closer to what was tested with the SDK.
> 

For cross platform building,  I find it convenient to have the PS3 (and
QS21) target, library, and header directories cross mounted on the
development system.  Thus I enable NFS server every time.  Outside of
that, there seems to be some saving of (typically wasted) memory by
turning things off.  256 MB is just too small not to customize IMHO. I
have not found anything in the SDK 3.1 that will not work so far in
cross platform development for the PS3.  For the QS21 blades and Mercury
rack mount, I use the full kernel with Cell support enabled.

One thing I have noticed FYI,  I did install the beta XLC and turned on
automatic SIMDization and gave it sufficient optimization to accomplish
this.  I added two large floating point vectors (32 MB) with alignment
pragma turned on.  The performance was only 5X the PS3's ppu only code.
 That is a little disappointing.  For my needs, I will be writing hot
spot assembly based blocks for the spe's.  I hear complaints about this
but it is a heck of a lot easier than FPGA programming!

It is good to know that FC8 should work.  I will try it on a QS21 I just
received and report.  It is a lot faster installing there than on the
PS3.  ;-).

Bob


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