Linux petitioners want Sony to open up PS3's graphical innards: RSX

Linux petitioners want Sony to open up PS3's graphical innards

So they can play Pong

By Paul Hales: Monday 23 April 2007, 15:08
WHILE THE LINUX community is pretty chuffed that Sony lets them stick
their fave operating system on the PS3 there's one hitch that is
giving them the heebie-jeebies.

Sony provides partitioning tools to allow the console to be dual
booted and to setup a Linux as the one to boot from.

Terrasoft produces a custom distro of Yellow Dog Linux for the
console. and versions of Fedora, Gentoo, an Ubuntu have all be seen
running n the box.

But the Penguinistas have run into the problem that all versions
running on the PS3 have no access to RSX, the Nvidia-sourced GPU.

Access is blocked by the Hypervisor chip so there is no chance of
getting around it without Sony's approval. And, naturally, Sony
doesn't want geeks producing 3D games under Linux and undermining its
investment. It flogs the console in order to make mountains of wonga
on the highly-priced games folk play on it.

"Do they think people will code Gears of War 2 at home?" asks our
Penguin-friendly course, who notes that the actual performance in
Linux is "bloody awful" because of the block.

So now there's a a petition online asking Sony to open up the RSX.
It's here.

Will Sony listen? If it looks like its cash flow would be hit by such
a move then that's highly unlikely, we suggest. But it's worth a shot.
µ

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39112

http://www.petitiononline.com/RSX/petition.html

http://www.petitiononline.com/RSX/petition-sign.html?

AirRaid wrote:

>
> Linux petitioners want Sony to open up PS3's graphical innards
>
> So they can play Pong
>

You can do a bit more with graphics than just play a game. Even if all a
particular developer is after is to produce a more pleasing desktop
interface for the PS3 console users, or a better slide show for the family
pictures.

As I understand it there isn't enough room to swing a cat in the memory of a
PS3 for Linux, so there wont be mega games or CAD software. But given an
API to the graphics and there is a lot you can do that has nothing to do
with playing games.

It must be beneficial to Sony to have users spending more 'happy time' on
PS3 even if they are not playing games.

In alt.games.video.sony-playstation2 BearItAll <spam@rassler.co.uk> wrote:

> As I understand it there isn't enough room to swing a cat in the memory of a
> PS3 for Linux, so there wont be mega games or CAD software. But given an
> API to the graphics and there is a lot you can do that has nothing to do
> with playing games.

The PS3 has a shared pool of 512MB of RAM, that should be plenty to run
Linux, a desktop, and some reasonable games (FreeCiv?) Heck, I was doing
that on my first laptop with 128MB of RAM years ago.

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In comp.os.linux.misc Doug Jacobs <djacobs@shell.rawbw.com> wrote:
: In alt.games.video.sony-playstation2 BearItAll <spam@rassler.co.uk> wrote:

:> As I understand it there isn't enough room to swing a cat in the memory of a
:> PS3 for Linux, so there wont be mega games or CAD software. But given an
:> API to the graphics and there is a lot you can do that has nothing to do
:> with playing games.

: The PS3 has a shared pool of 512MB of RAM, that should be plenty to run
: Linux, a desktop, and some reasonable games (FreeCiv?) Heck, I was doing
: that on my first laptop with 128MB of RAM years ago.

Heck- if you want to go back a ways-- try CA 1980 with 24k ( yes k ) RAM for the
entire OS, programs and 256k tape drive for all storage.
No problem running games like Pacman.

For anything modern/glitzy like KDE/Thunderbird/etc 512 is getting pretty minimal
and in many cases painful. But who cares- a GB RAM now costs what- maybe $100?

Stan
--
Stan Bischof ("stan" at the below domain)
www.worldbadminton.com

In alt.games.video.sony-playstation2 stan@worldbadminton.com wrote:

> For anything modern/glitzy like KDE/Thunderbird/etc 512 is getting pretty minimal
> and in many cases painful. But who cares- a GB RAM now costs what- maybe $100?

The GUI's have gotten larger/greedier with regards to RAM, that's for
sure. Didn't always used to be that way.

As for shoving more RAM into the box, this is a Playstation3, so no
hardware additions are allowed, or are feasibly possible.

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stan@worldbadminton.com wrote:

> For anything modern/glitzy like KDE/Thunderbird/etc 512 is getting pretty minimal
> and in many cases painful. But who cares- a GB RAM now costs what- maybe $100?

Really? I run an old version of KDE, but I run Live-CDs once in a
while with KDE 3.5. I have 256 MB ram, a 135 MB swap, but it doesn't
swap a lot.

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Doug Jacobs
<djacobs@shell.rawbw.com>
wrote
on Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:19:51 -0000
<1331ra7emt1se50@corp.supernews.com>:
> In alt.games.video.sony-playstation2 stan@worldbadminton.com wrote:
>
>> For anything modern/glitzy like KDE/Thunderbird/etc 512 is getting pretty minimal
>> and in many cases painful. But who cares- a GB RAM now costs what- maybe $100?
>
> The GUI's have gotten larger/greedier with regards to RAM, that's for
> sure. Didn't always used to be that way.

Well, part of it is simply the fact that the displays are
getting greedier.

Anyone else remember the 5150 -- the
original IBM PC, as it were? I'm not even
sure they had the CGA when they released it
(http://www.old-computers.com/museum/...asp?st=1&c=274
says they did) but the CGA would today be characterized as
either 320 x 200 x 4 colors (with two selectable palettes:
brown/red/green and pink/blue/white, both equally ugly),
or 640 x 200 x "monochrome".

That's all of -- wait for it -- 16k. And at that it was an
improvement over the Apple ][, though the latter was able
to do some false-color NTSC trickery within its 40x48x16
(woo, 1k) or 280 x 192 x 4 color (I don't remember that
one) display. But then, the IBM offering was a slightly
newer vintage: 1981 versus 1977.

Nowadays, displays are more like 2560 x 2048 x 16 million
colors, which translates into a minimum of 16 megabytes
just for the raster, and probably 32 megabytes because they
like to put pels in longwords as opposed to shoehorning
them into 3 bytes (makes access faster). Also, there
are a lot of extra capabilities: "accelerators" in the
older cards, presumably, texturing and lighting
descriptors in the newer ones.

There's also room for a font or two.

>
> As for shoving more RAM into the box, this is a Playstation3, so no
> hardware additions are allowed, or are feasibly possible.
>

The disk drive is upgradeable, but there's at least one active
discussion that suggests a soldering (or, as one poster puts it,
sautering (???)) iron is one's best friend.

http://boardsus.playstation.com/play...read.id=661727

(This is distinct of course from such things as flash cards, for saving
game state.)

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In alt.games.video.sony-playstation2 The Ghost In The Machine <ewill@sirius.tg00suus7038.net> wrote:

> Well, part of it is simply the fact that the displays are
> getting greedier.

True, but it still seems silly to me. I remember having what I considered a
fully functional GUI desktop with KDE cicra 1998, on what was considered
an "old" machine in the office at that time (used to be the secretary's)
On that machine, I did my basic office work, and then had a couple of
separate machines for my testing/compatibility work.

Nowadays, I'm sure that running a "nice" GUI like the modern version of
KDE or GNOME, will consume much more memory for little more than some
extra flashy widgets.

> That's all of -- wait for it -- 16k. And at that it was an
> improvement over the Apple ][, though the latter was able
> to do some false-color NTSC trickery within its 40x48x16
> (woo, 1k) or 280 x 192 x 4 color (I don't remember that
> one) display. But then, the IBM offering was a slightly
> newer vintage: 1981 versus 1977.

I do remember the Apple, and later dealing with CGA, EGA, VGA and SVGA
(oooh!) I think my 15" monitor could do SVGA interlaced. hahaha.

> > As for shoving more RAM into the box, this is a Playstation3, so no
> > hardware additions are allowed, or are feasibly possible.
> >

> The disk drive is upgradeable, but there's at least one active
> discussion that suggests a soldering (or, as one poster puts it,
> sautering (???)) iron is one's best friend.

> http://boardsus.playstation.com/play...read.id=661727

> (This is distinct of course from such things as flash cards, for saving
> game state.)

The Playstation2 could be hacked to use a larger hard drive, and if you're
really brave, you can even hack the current slimline model which doesn't
even have an IDE connector anymore. Whee!

However, the Playstation3 comes with a hard drive, standard, and can be
easily replaced with any laptop SATA drive as illustrated in the
instruction booklet. The mandatory hard drive also means that (finally!)
the Playstation doesn't require additional memory cards for storing game
data.

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