asbestOS - Linux is back and using 7th spe?

[vesh]

Hey I found out about this new thing titles "asbestOS" which brings Linux back to the ps3, both the phat and slim models. I think it gets booted from a usb stick I'm not quite sure someone more smart about this can work that out haha but it uses the 7th spe which would mean for example emulators for say N64 which couldn't be used on otherOS could probably now be used

Google "asbestos ps3" and give me your take on this. There's also a youtube vid of it

[billb]

We've discussed it a bit in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7266

Last time I checked it didn't look like it was ready for general use. I don't know all the details about what is and isn't supported yet, but when it was first announced you could only run from an NFS share (not the internal drive or USB drive).

Regarding usage of the 7th SPE, this makes no difference at all in terms of running the various emulators available -- all the emulators use only the Cell's main processing unit (PPE). What's interesting is the possibility of having access to the RSX so we could finally have accelerated 2D/3D graphics. As far as N64 emulation, I'm not sure that it will be fast enough even with access to the GPU. Aside from emulators, it would open up a whole new range of games and applications we could run that require hardware accelerated OpenGL. Still, you need to have drivers available and I'm guessing it's not going to be trivial getting that to work.

[ppietro]

We've discussed it a bit in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7266

Last time I checked it didn't look like it was ready for general use. I don't know all the details about what is and isn't supported yet, but when it was first announced you could only run from an NFS share (not the internal drive or USB drive).

Regarding usage of the 7th SPE, this makes no difference at all in terms of running the various emulators available -- all the emulators use only the Cell's main processing unit (PPE). What's interesting is the possibility of having access to the RSX so we could finally have accelerated 2D/3D graphics. As far as N64 emulation, I'm not sure that it will be fast enough even with access to the GPU. Aside from emulators, it would open up a whole new range of games and applications we could run that require hardware accelerated OpenGL. Still, you need to have drivers available and I'm guessing it's not going to be trivial getting that to work.

Awwww man - you beat me to it! I was going to post something like this.

BTW: Here's the post showing AsbestOS running a sample RSX program:
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7266&start=510#p40110

Cheers,
Paul

[kengreen]

The Console Hacking talk at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin finished. The authors plan to make linux available on all PS3 regardless of firmware. their website http://fail0verflow.com is not yet up but will be soon. A demo is planned for tomorrow at 27C3. Looks like anything is possible now. Stay tuned.

[billb]

Interesting statement they make on twitter:

"we only started looking at the ps3 after otheros was killed."

[ppietro]

Interesting statement they make on twitter:

"we only started looking at the ps3 after otheros was killed."

Yup - looks like that YouTube video was right all along. In fact, I think I wrote a thread about this years ago.

What do you know? I did:

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2813&start=0

Cheers,
Paul