15 Apr 2007 (updated 16 Apr 2007 at 10:33 UTC)
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Completed the first install of Fedora rawhide on PlayStation
3 today, from the tree at
rsync://bombadil.infradead.org/ps3-rawhide-20070415/
The rawhide kernel works on PS3; all I needed to change was
a few things in the installer and related packages. There
are updated rhpl, booty, kudzu and anaconda packages, for
which the
source is in the SRPMS/ directory. All the patches have been
filed in bugzilla, findable from the PS3
tracker bug.
There's a bootloader image in
PS3/otheros/otheros.bld where the PlayStation will
find it if it's burned to DVD. I created it manually with
the old 2.6.16 kernel because kexec isn't yet working in the
2.6.21 kernel, but it uses the initrd automatically
generated from anaconda with petitboot,
which is in Extras.
The biggest issue I have at the moment is that the graphical
installer uses a fixed resolution of 800x600 -- which
doesn't work too well on a 480i screen, and we default to
480i on PS3. For now, I just added a few options for
different video modes into the bootloader configuration in
he install tree, and added 'text' to the arguments
for the 480i option.
Installing Fedora rawhide on PlayStation 3:
- Fetch the install tree:
mkdir rawhide-ps3
cd rawhide-ps3
rsync -avz rsync://bombadil.infradead.org/rawhide-ps3-20070415/ .
(If you have an existing copy of PPC rawhide lying around
already, use that to seed the rsync by copying it into your
rawhide-ps3 directory first.)
- Burn the tree to DVD. From the rawhide-ps3-20070415
directory:
growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -R -J .
If you don't have a DVD writer, you can use the CD image in
images/boot.iso to boot and then do a network
installation instead. Just export the tree you've downloaded
by NFS or HTTP or FTP, and then boot the CD and point it at
your export
- Boot into Game OS and use the self-update procedure to
make sure you're running the
latest firmware (1.60 at time of writing). Also use the
Format Tool to ensure your
disk is partitioned such that the "Other OS" is permitted
some space. Then install the
boot loader and run it as described in the "Performing the
Installation" and "Starting the Bootloader" stages of the Sony
instructions.
You might want to note what it says at
the bottom about how to get back to Game OS.
- You should find yourself in the petitboot graphical
bootloader. Insert the CD/DVD and within a few seconds, you
should see it turn up the screen, with options for different
video modes. Select the one you want, or wait 5 seconds and
the default (720p) will start.
- Now you're in the Fedora installer. It should all Just
Work™. As is normal on anything but servers where you
actually expect to change disks around, make sure you don't
use the silly Fedora default partitioning scheme which uses
LVM -- choose the option 'Custom' and just make normal
partitions on the drive instead. Petitboot isn't yet tested
with LVM.
- When it finishes, it should reboot and petitboot should
let you boot from the hard drive. Rebooting doesn't always
work yet in the current kernel, so you may need to power
cycle when it wants to reboot.
- When it comes up, run 'yum install smolt' and
then 'smoltSendProfile' to let us know that you're
running Fedora
on PS3.
Note that I've removed all the pointless 64-bit userspace
packages which the installer usually installs by default (
bug
#233427). If for some strange reason you actually
want some 64-bit userspace, you'll need to install
it yourself later.
All of this is fairly trivial and should land in Fedora
rawhide fairly soon, with the possible exception of the
otheros.bld bootloader. That currently needs a
kernel with working kexec, and a patch to anaconda which doesn't
seem to have been received favourably. And even then it
may end up producing an image which is too large to fit --
it's possible that we'll need to build a special minimal
kernel for use in the bootloader image.