[mdlug] Very preliminary Linux-on-PS3 report

[Ingles, Raymond]

I got some time yesterday afternoon to retry installing Linux on my
PS3. To fit into the limited RAM on the console, you need to use a
text-based installer. But once it's done, it comes up graphically just
fine.

 Installing on the PS3 is not quite like installing on the PC. Although
there are menu items built-in for installing alternative operating
systems, Linux is definitely something of a second-class citizen. You
need to provide a bootloader, and then set the default operating system
to boot up to "OtherOS".

 At that point, you can launch the installer off of a CD, and things are
very similar to a regular PC install. I was using Xubuntu, the
XFCE-based version that's a little lighter on RAM requirements. It came
up fine, though the overall install took about an hour. Once I was
logged in, it was able to connect to my WPA-encrypted wifi network
without issue. Responsiveness was a little off - it's definitely a
RAM-limited system - but it was perfectly usable in the limited testing
I did.

 I set it up to install updates, and it was actually useful. The
download speed of my PS3 has never been where I'd like, and I was able
to monitor the download rate much easier under Linux and move my WAP
around to get a better signal. While I did that, I set up the VRAM swap.

 You see, the PS3 has 256MB of main RAM, and 256MB of video ram.
However, Linux on the PS3 runs under a hypervisor and doesn't get to use
hardware acceleration of the graphics card; it's basically a dumb
framebuffer. That means that most of the VRAM is unused, and clever
developers figured out how to use that VRAM as a fast swap device. It's
not as fast as full RAM, but *much* faster than swapping to disk, so it
provides a noticeable speed boost. It's not configured by default, but
pretty straightforward to enable.

 I didn't have time to play with video modes or anything like that; just
a base install and update. The main reason I want to try this is to get
a bunch of old emulators running on the PS3, using our big-screen.
SCUMMVM, MAME, Stella, etc. would look very nice over our fireplace, but
I'll have to come back to it.

 I can't confirm it yet, but I think that I may have run into an
annoying second-class-citizen limitation. It looks like you can set the
PS3 to default into Linux, and probably even set up a menu item in the
bootloader to boot back into "Game OS", the native PS3 OS. But if you
do, the default will be reset, and it'll keep booting into Game OS until
you specifically tell it to reboot into Linux. It doesn't look like you
can have the bootloader come up each time like on a PC. But perhaps
there's an option I missed, I'll look into it.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                      (313) 227-2317
 
 "A PC without Windows is like chocolate cake with no mustard."
                  - JAPH Doggy, on Slashdot
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