[Cbe-oss-dev] Bug#514055: debian still not working on PS3

[Geoff Levand]

On 03/22/2009 12:44 PM, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 10:45:25AM -0700, Geoff Levand wrote:
>> On 03/21/2009 10:38 AM, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>> > That is the BD drive. Did you have a disc in the drive at that point?
>> > If so, what kind of disc?
>> 
>> The mini.iso installer, a CD-ROM.
> 
> The fact that you were successful makes me doubt it's a serious problem,
> but it warrants investigating.
> 
> The installer should store some logs on your hard disk, under
> /var/log/installer. Could you send me those files? Note that it may
> contain some private information, such as your root password, and a list
> of the packages you've got installed.

I'll send you that tomorrow.

>> PS3 uses petitboot (http://ozlabs.org/~jk/projects/petitboot/).
>> It is a kexec based bootloader which can read kboot.conf and
>> yaboot.conf files.
>> 
>> Due to the way the PS3 boots, the user must install a bootloader
>> to flash memory before they can load a distro's installer.
>> 
>> I'll try the yaboot install and see what happens.  Is it possible
>> to arrange for the installer to just create the yaboot.conf
>> without installing yaboot?
> 
> No, that won't work. I simply wasn't aware of the particular way in
> which the PS3 is booted.
> 
> I see that petitboot is free software. In that case, we should be able
> to at least put it on the CD images.

Yes, but as Wartan mentioned, it is not so practical for distros to
build it from sources.

Just FYI, I put binary releases of petitboot here:

  http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/cell/ps3-petitboot/

> Is it possible to install or update the flash booter from Linux, or can
> one only do that from the PS3 builtin operating system?

It can be done from either.  From Linux, it is done with ps3-flash-util
from the ps3-utils package (http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/ps3-utils).

Command is 'ps3-flash-util -w image'.

-Geoff