hbr

Trying to debug a bus error on my PS3, I realised that the version of GDB I have installed doesn’t support debugging of SPU programs. There doesn’t seem to be a Debian packaged version available that does, so I built my own.

Because I found no obvious google result, I share this with the zero other people that I expect may one day be interested : the key option for configure appears to be

--enable-targets=spu

This information was brought to you via the gdb.spec file, and a post to the gcc-testresults mailing list.

I’ve updated the Linux distros page with links to articles about installing Ubuntu 9.10 [Joep Cremers Weblog] and Fedora 12 [Geoff Levand, Ken Werner] on the Playstation 3.

In mosty unrelated news,

• IBM will not be releasing a previously planned successor to the PowerXCell 8i [heise online, Playstation University]
  (neither article conveys particularly clear information to me – not least because I have only a machine translation of the first one)
• Playstation 3 firmware version 3.10 seems to have added ABC iView and BBC iPlayer support to the XMB (the presence of which *may* be related to your PSN region, geographical restrictions to accessing video content still seem to apply). If you can’t see it in the TV column of your XMB, try rebooting…

Ken Werner has written a nice guide to installing Fedora 11 on the PS3.  (And I’ve added the link to the Linux distro page).

Inside Ken’s page is some details on installing and running demos from the recent “OpenCL Development Kit for Linux on Power”, which is something I’m now even more keen to try :)

(It seems a little odd that the only place that OpenCL SPE acceleration is mentioned is in one of the FAQs…)

I’ve been asked about selecting a Linux distro for use on the Playstation 3 a few times recently, so I’ve put together a page summarising some of the options which has mentions of pdaXrom, Debian, Ubuntu, Yellow Dog, Fedora, RHEL and Gentoo.

It’s all based on my own knowledge and experience – if there’s something you think is worth adding (or correcting, or improving) let me know.

[Update 20091021: Expanded the entry for Gentoo based on suggestions from unsolo & cheriff, and added a link to Windows-Hosted Cell SDK which I saw mentioned by @domipheus]