Sony PS/2 with Linux kit?

[pointwood]

I talked with Duffman earlier today about this.

How would a PS/2 with the Linux kit perform?

Would it be possible to create a client for it?

[Brian the Fist]

Sounds like a great idea. Now who's going to sacrifice their PS2 to me so I can do it? ;) (It would look great on my new projection TV too..).

I actually thought about doing a Xbox/PS2/Dreamcast version about a month ago. These consoles are starting to get internet connected, and tons of people have them, but I wonder how many people actual use them for anything besides games. I own none of these systems and know very little about them. Does anyone know if it would be possible to have a program like DF run in the background while people play games on it, for example? Or would it only work if they've actually gone out and put Linux on it, in which case it would work like all the other Linux versions and probably not reach that wide and audience? I welcome your comments.

[Jodie]

The PS2's OS is a realtime OS. The processor isn't particularly beefy, but it does have several vector units.

Last I read, nine thousand linux ps2 kits were preordered (two of them are mine! ;) )

Development kit for PS2's embedded RT/OS is insanely expensive. We did a port of our stuff to it at the office. Funky environment.

If you want to do a PS2 Linux port, I can loan you my spare kit and send you a modded PS2. I can't lend you the PS2-RTOS development kit, however. The NDA with Sony for that one is [shiver]:scared:

[pointwood]

I know you can buy a Linux kit for the PS/2 which should mean that you have a basic working Linux distro running on your Playstation.

I just found this FAQ:
http://playstation2-linux.com/faq.php

It looks like it's a somewhat old kernel - here is what's in the package:

The Linux operating system
Kernel version 2.2.1
Xfree86 X-Windows version 3.3.6 with support for PlayStation 2 Graphics Synthesizer
GCC 2.95.2 and GLIBC 2.2.2
An alpha version of Mesa 3D supporting limited graphics acceleration
PlayStation 2 Development Libraries, device drivers, tools and sample code
EDIT: To slow :)

[Dyyryath]

Originally posted by Jodie
Last I read, nine thousand linux ps2 kits were preordered (two of them are mine! ;) )

Oh my god, could this woman be any more perfect? Why couldn't you be living in NC? ;) :D

[pointwood]

Have the stats god fallen in love?! ;) :|party|:

Besides that, I must agree with you Dyyryath ;)

[MAD-ness]

LoL.

I wonder if she is blushing, or contemplating getting a restraining order (or two)? ;)

Odd architecture on the PS2, but it has HUGE internal bandwidth. I remember reading all sorts of articles on the architecture of the Emotion Engine before it came out. Intriguing stuff and someone who is a very persistent and skilled coder can do some very impressive things with it, but it is a bit unweildy to work with, last I heard.

Would be a hella cool port though. :)

[Hat Monster]

The PS2 isn't that exotic when you look at it. It has two RDRAM channels giving 3.2GB/s bandwidth, pretty much the same as a P4.

The usable CPU (the extra bits are pretty much dedicated to handling graphics) is nothing more than an embedded 300MHz MIPS III! With the PS2 being as it is, unless you're concentrating on SIMD, you're not going to really do much impressing. The Vector Units (VUs) which work on SIMD and VLIW are really something else and if you're not using them, you're using the standard MIPS FPU or you're in the MIPS III, neither of which are going to win any awards. I mean, the MIPS III is only dual issue. K7 blows the MIPS III clean out of the water.

The first vector unit, VU0, can be used as a standard co-processor. The second, however, is hooked in with the GIF and the graphics engine, so you're stuck to a single SIMD pipeline (or VLIW) unless you can do some assembler (this ain't going to happen in a compiler) trickery with VU1.

What you are going to get out of the PS2 is incredible FFT performance. It's easily vectorizable and loves lots of bandwidth - a match made in heaven for the Emotion Engine. I imagine that DF is FPU heavy and while it's not going to suck on the PS2, it's not going to be some killer monster that eats Athlons for breakfast. What I would love to see on PS2 is Prime95 or SETI@Home.

H@

[Jodie]

I haven't seen the algo, obviously, but it should be pretty SIMD optimizable and sure seems to love its memory bandwidth.

I don't think anyone was thinking the PS2 was a supercomputer.

But with wholesale costs on it at aroundish 30% (dancing on the head of an NDA pin) of what I'm paying wholesale for XP1800 systems, ($270 out the door), it might be tempting.

Tremendously less heat. Tremendously less power consumption. Tremendously smaller size. That's a good argument.

I could throw 300 in the space of my 50 XPs right now and my power consumption and heat would go DOWN rather than up. My gut (and having done some ports to the box) would have us somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% of the performance of one of my older tbirds. So I'd effectively add double my current output in the same size room. Wow... Sweet. Comes out just a tad more expensive but the real expense of a supercluster is cooling and power, not the machines... (sorry, thinking outloud)

The secret here would be to get it running under PS2's RTOS rather than under PS2 linux which would more than triple the effective price.

[Jodie]

And as to the the other topic that we've rudely sidelined with talking about the PS/2 - Thanks! I'm flattered!

But I've dated enough geeks to have a reasonable n=, and let me tell you how it ends up:

Months 0-6:

I'm impressed. Wow! A woman with all the geek toys in the world - a Chief Technology Officer for a soon-to-be-public technology company - someone that knows hardware and software engineering too! I'm in lust - errr - love!

Months 7-9:

Gee, I'm feeling a little threatened. The sex is great - almost as good as the 68" DLP and dedicated 15 speaker theater. But maybe this isn't such a good idea... The only upside to my bruised ego is that she works 18hrs/day much of the time, so atleast the bruises fade a bit...

Month 10:

Gosh Jodie - this has been great and all, but how about you just leave for a few decades and I'll house-sit for you...

---

I'm not bitter - just a realist. :bang: :p ( :cry: )

[Dyyryath]

Ah, you just need to find someone with an ego that's not JUST based around their knowledge of computers. ;)

Not all guys are threatened by a smart woman. Besides, that's what's appealing. I'll admit that the crazy hardware you've got is nice, but that's just stuff. It's not nearly as cool as actually being able to talk intelligently with a woman about some thorny programming problem.

Besides, some of us have our own toys, and believe it or not, they aren't ALL related to computers. ;)

I get slack from my fiance on a daily basis about having motorcycles, snowboards, wakeboards, spare race engines, telescopes, mountain bikes, and a host of other 'goodies' in my living room in place of the more traditional furniture. :D :D

[Dyyryath]

Heh, sorry but somehow, this just seemed appropriate. (http://www.gamespy.com/dailyvictim/index.asp?id=381) :D :D

[Jodie]

I hear you. I'm just bitter - errr, a realist.

Do you do any deep sky work with your scope? What do you have? (should move this offline, huh?) I have an Ultima 10 (Celestron) and a Deep 16 from Orion... I haven't been to a dark sky in so long that they have about 2" of dust on them... [pout]

Race engines - motorcyles or cars? (my ex is a driver for a major team - I learned a lot about cars when he was growing into his own... Started off pitting, ended up building engines)

---

See, that's the other side of the scale. I either see 'threatened' or I get the same thing you do "why the hell is there a huge viper engine in the garage? What are you going to do with that thing anyway?" "Why supercharge it, of course, dear!" "Why?" "It's a challange" "We don't own a car that could take an engine that big do we?" "No" "Ummmmmmm"

Tell your Fiance I said "she's lucky and get over it." I'll just leave it at that...:crazy: :crazy: :crazy:

[Jodie]

Originally posted by Dyyryath
Heh, sorry but somehow, this just seemed appropriate. (http://www.gamespy.com/dailyvictim/index.asp?id=381) :D :D

Promptly moved to the RAID and marked for archiving.

THAT WAS AWESOME!!! I HOWELED at: "The screaming deep inside me was probably my ovaries wailing in protest. The screams on the outside were from me pointing to Jake's face and yelling "0WNED!" " ROFL!!! :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

Thank you for sharing that one!

[Dyyryath]

I had a feeling that you would appreciate that one.. :D

Did you vote for it? I found this quote at the bottom of the results page, which made me laugh:

"Show a man some skin and he's yours for life. Hit him in the face with a giant turnip and he gets all weird on you."

[pointwood]

Originally posted by Jodie
See, that's the other side of the scale. I either see 'threatened' or I get the same thing you do "why the hell is there a huge viper engine in the garage? What are you going to do with that thing anyway?" "Why supercharge it, of course, dear!" "Why?" "It's a challange" "We don't own a car that could take an engine that big do we?" "No" "Ummmmmmm" I could live with that... ;) :p :D

[Jodie]

Originally posted by Dyyryath
I had a feeling that you would appreciate that one.. :D

Did you vote for it? I found this quote at the bottom of the results page, which made me laugh:

"Show a man some skin and he's yours for life. Hit him in the face with a giant turnip and he gets all weird on you."

Almost missed your edit - yup! I voted for it! Was thinking that might have to be my new tagline.:rotfl: :haddock: :rotfl:

[Brian the Fist]

:|ot|:
Now then, Back to what we're supposed to be talking. Anyone know if it would be feasible to do an X-Box port?
Jodie: I'd be interested if you could give me more details on the PS2 RTOS kit as well as Linux dev kit.
The basic requirements for building the client are:

A POSIX compliant OS with a C compiler and make on it. Some kind of shell, such as sh or csh is needed too. ncurses is needed but the source code is available and could be ported if not already done. Worst case it can be left out and run only in quiet mode. Really curses and libc are the only external libraries that we don't currently have the complete source for that we use.
In terms of hardware, approx. 32MB RAM is needed by the DF process when running. Approx. 30MB disk space is needed, sometimes a bit more. An internet connection is also required of course and it must support making HTTP requests over port 80.
If these somewhat simple requirements are met, a port can in all likelihood be made in a matter of hours. (The POSIX-compliant part and missing csh are what's currently holding up the BeOS port ;) )

The possible game systems I think are: Xbox, PS2, Dreamcast and Gamecube. I know nothing about any of these.

The other question is what would be the best implementation - could we make it somehow run in the background while people play games (with low priority of course)? Or would they have to dedicate the game machine to DF (which some people might do since as Jodie pointed out it works out to a better deal)?

The sooner I can get useful info here, and the hardware (any interested in donations?) the sooner I can try it out, so if you know anything, please share..

[Jodie]

[Edit: Sorry, should have gotten Legal's views first before posting this... I've edited my post]

I can say a few things here, a few more in email and the remainder I can put you in contact with the right people for..

My company does AV streaming and advanced compression. We build and sell settop box software, firmware and turnkey solutions for entertainment and video conferencing. We have ports to some of the platforms you mention. Specifically PS2 among others.

All that said -

I doubt you'd want to undertake a port for the PS2's operating system. Not POSIX. [You'll need to thinks things through carefully] - this is an RTOS.

I've seen a lot of teeth-knashing and screamed explitives from engineering...

If you want to really explore it, I can put you in touch with the right people.

[The license is also different than you might be familiar with.]

---

The Linux4PS2 side of the house is a lot more promising. Networking handled over either USB or a dedicated expansion module. The kit comes with a harddrive and interface, keyboard mouse interfacing through USB, too. It's a solid linux distro and should be buildable for you in a couple hours. Very nearly a make clean all, I'd be willing to bet.

I'm in line for two of them right now, should have the first two in a couple of weeks.

I can donate a PS2 to the cause and an indefinite loan on my second Linux kit - it's just a backup in case something happens and that company goes away and I have to reverse engineer it to keep it going.

Rumor and strictly rumor regardless of the source has it that the PS3 took a lot of the experiences of the linuxps2 group(s) into account...

----

Dreamcast Linux would also be an easy port. Too early on the Xbox Linux explorations. I know nothing about GameCube...

[DuffMan|TSF|]

Hello everybody:D

I bought a ps2 on the first day i could and i ordered a ps2-linux kit yesterday. I just realized my monitor doesn't support SOG(sync-on-green), or someone at http://playstation2-linux.com doesn't know how to get a monitor to work ( I have a philips 109B ). So anyone want to sell/donate a SOG monitor?

Here is an article describing the EE on the ps2:
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/playstation2/ee-1.html

[Jodie]

Thanks for the link - an amazing amount of detective work he did.

[beefdart]

ummm can anyone say netbsd??

[pointwood]

Just found this review of the PS/2 Linux kit: http://www.execpc.com/~halkun/PSLin/

Pretty interesting IMHO.

[Starfish]

With some luck we're able to run Linux from an X-Box.

In fact there's a complete project to achieve this in a legal way @

http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/

And recently they had the following news:

"Anonymous donor will award US$ 200,000 for Linux on the Xbox " :eek:

So I think a few more people have interest to invest some time now ;) :rotfl:

[Scoofy12]

Likewise, what do you think it would take to port DF to the native Xbox OS? isn't it some flavor of NT? Probably quite easy to do, but don't know how expensive. For what, $200 for an 800MHz P3, i'd probably buy one... you know, for the good of humanity, of course. not for me:jester:

[Brian the Fist]

Been there, done that. I already inquired to Microsoft about getting a legal license for the Xbox SDK. They felt it was not in Micro$oft's best interest, as it would not be profitable for them and it would detract from people playing games.

More importantly, the supposed 'internet' connectivity it will have is bogus - it is going to be a private network that Micro$oft controls - after all, they wouldn't want anyone doing anything BESIDES playing microsoft XBox games on it, would they? And maybe contacting MSN. :p

[Starfish]

Progress is being made as we speak: :)

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2118715,00.html

"A German programmer says he has made the first step towards running the Linux operating system on Microsoft's Xbox games console -- without running into any legal entaglements.

Michael Steil, a German programmer, has built an application called "linuxpreview", which simply flashes the Xbox LED and draws a penguin on the Xbox start-up screen, along with the message "Xbox Linux Coming Soon!" and a link to the Xbox Linux Web site. However, it is touted as the first application to run on Xbox without using tools from the official Xbox Software Development Kit (SDK), and is the first step toward essentially turning the Xbox into a Linux-based PC. "

If the X-box becomes a Linux-based PC I think changing some network settings wouldn't be that hard either...

Aahh...cheap and small folding awaits :p :D

Looks like Microsoft might be helping an unexpected charity :rotfl:

P.S.

Brian, perhaps you can convince Microsoft to give you a legal X-box SDK license by building in a buddy-list into the folding client...and special, customized "web events" that tell you when there's a protein switch coming :rotfl: :rotfl: :jester: