[Cbe-oss-dev] Looking for people interested in the Sony PS3 and Linux

[Geoff Levand]

Hi John,

John Lange wrote:
> I would like to make contact with others who have done work getting the
> PS3 to run Linux.

OK, that is accomplished.  I recommend you also try via IRC:

  #cell on irc.oftc.net
  #ps3dev on frenode

> Specifically I have been spending a significant amount of time recently
> trying to get things working smoothly on the PS3 under OpenSuSE 11 and
> I'm hoping this list might be a good place to ask some questions.
> 
> As far as I can tell there is no "OpenSuSE / PS3" specific community or
> mailing list so is this list the best place?

This ML is OK for PS3 specifics, but you may do better using OpenSuse
or PowerPC forums for non-PS3 specifics.

> I've been trying to add as much information as possible to the OpenSUSE
> PS3 web site http://en.opensuse.org/PS3 but this is strictly a one-way
> thing.
> 
> Under the assumption that this is the best place, here are a couple of
> starter questions.
> 
> - Since the PS3 has limited resources compared with a full-blown PC,
> does it not make sense to have a PS3 specific kernel that contains only
> the things that the PS3 needs?

In general, distributors want a single kernel that runs on all
platforms.  In the case of PS3, that would be the OpenSuSE 64 bit
powerpc kernel.

> There is already a kernel-ps3 for suse but its for the "otheros" boot
> process only. However, as far as I can see this bare-bones ps3 kernel is
> missing very little (for example sound support) to make it a fully
> functional runtime kernel.
> 
> Is this not a good idea?

Sorry, I don't quite understand what your idea is.

I think it is not good to have an OpenSuSE specific bootloader
though.  I am working to get the OpenSuSE installer support
into my petitboot releases.  I have some of the patches from
Stefan Assmann merged in, but have not released a build yet.
Those are here:

  http://git.infradead.org/ps3/petitboot-patches.git

>From what I understand, the OpenSuse powerpc installer cannot be
run using kexec, so something different is needed to get it loaded
and running.  I will talk with Stefan next week at LPC about the
details.

> - Speaking of sound support, so far I haven't been able to get my PS3 to
> make a peep. The OS seems to recognize the sound device but no audio
> comes out. Could this be dependant on the way the PS3 is connected? I
> have mine connected via the optical output.
> 
> Any help debugging this would be appreciated.

I recommend you check the archives of this mail list.  There ave been
several discussions about it.  For my OpenSuse installation (11.0) I just
needed to add myself to the audio group.  As a start, try:

	su -c 'speaker-test -c2'

-Geoff