PS3 GAME OS & RSX DRIVER PLUS LINUX QUESTIONS

[Haxxor]

Hello all. Iam new round here. Iam trying to play around with building a cluster. With ps3s. Yes I know it's already been done. Just it's new to me. I have practical reasons for wanting to do so. Anyway, so I have decided to use asbestOS. I prefer the idea of a bare metal instance. Although. When i check the core count on linux. It says 2. Instead of 6 at least I am expecting.

7th needs a patched kernal. I think. And 8th is unlocked with geohots hardware buffer overflow glitch. Correct me if I am wrong. Apart from the cores. I am actively looking for a rsx linux partial glevand driver. No point in having full acess to the rsx and there's no driver.

There's the freebsd patched os with rsx partial driver. I suppose I could use that. I havent tried it yet. But i am not sure if asbetos or bootos boot loader will even work with it.

So to summarise.

1. I need 7 cores available, at least. How do I go about that.

2. I need acess to the rsx driver glevands (partial)
If you have the download please link me to it.

3. If possible and I can't find that old ancient driver. How do I boot freebsd through grub.

P.s by 'partial' rsx driver. I mean it can't really run games. But it can crunch data well. From what I understand. Perfect for a cluster.

 

[bleepbleep]

To use the 7th spu you pass this command:

spu_base.enum_shared=1

as argument to booting linux.

If you are using petitboot, in the petitboot menu highlight the kernel that you want to boot. press "e" to edit, add the command to the line with the space separated list of boot arguments. hit enter to go back to the boot choices and boot linux. Of course, add it to your boot config if you want it permanent.

What are you using to count the cores? Try using spu-top. It will show activity for spus 0-5 unless you pass the extra boot argument. Then it will show 0-6. use command: ./spu-top. Then internal spu-top commands like press "s" to show the spus
and "q" to quit from spu-top command interface. Maybe "l" or "h" for list/help??

Oh, I just remember the spu filesystem must be mounted for spu-top to work. after creating directory /spu

mount -t spufs spufs /spu

Also there is function spe_cpu_info_get() in libspe2 you can use, but it is a little funky -- at least the old version. The command count_available_spus actually calls the command count_physical_spus.

If I can find my old notes on the 8th spu, I will post them. It was only some simple tests after editing the syscon, so probably not useful.

 

[Haxxor]

Ah perfect. Thanks a lot. One last question. I would like to access asbestOS through petitboot. How would I go about that.

 

[bleepbleep]

I never used asbestos. Wasn't it a linux loader alternative to petitboot?

Petitboot normally detects a bootable linux, whether in the bd drive, usb stick/hdd or internal hadd. You could install petitboot, then use a usb flash drive as the installation media, which you could test with booting asbestos or linux, and see if it meets your needs.

There were at least a couple of different versions of asbestos. Didn't the 1st one rely on an exploit in 3.41 firmware? A later version was booted from devflash. That version would be easy to test without even installing petitboot. First, it's copied to devflash, then the path to lv2_kernel.self in lv1 is patched in ram. It's part of a table in lv1. IIRC, the page size is also in the table as a power of 2, which can be increased for linux. Anyway, after patching the path to lv2 with the path to the asbestos file in devflash, a soft reboot is done and asbestos boots instead of lv2 kernel. I don't remember if it had a stage 1 and stage 2. You may be familiar with lv2 loader that team rebug later released. If looked at in ida, it's easy to see that it uses the same trick. No matter which boot option you choose in the lv2 loader, usb or hdd, it is actually copied to devflash and then booted from there.

Alternatively, when red ribbon 5 is installed, petiboot's boot menu will show 2 choices (other than recovery or gameos), vmlinux-2.6.38-ppc64-otheros and vmlinux-2.6.38-ppc64-asbestos. Unfortunately, RR5 otheros does not appear to have the patches necessary to use the 7th spu. I never used the asbestos choice. Red Ribbon 7 does support using the 7th spu with that boot argument posted above, but it only has otheros as a boot choice, IIRC.

The ps3 vuart tools are used to try activating the 8th spu, or from gameos using the update manager, though I can't recommend it.