Develop for PlayStation 3 Linux

Question

I\'m interested in developing software for Sony PlayStation 3 consoles which contains a multi-core Cell processor, targeting any PS3-compatible Linux distributi

Answer 1

You might also try Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Their PS3 support is pretty good, and instructions for installation and a rough primer on compilation can be found here. GCC 4.3 and binutils 4.18 include targets for the Cell PPU (a generic PowerPC target) and SPUs, and there are packages available in the Ubuntu repositories (e.g. spu-gcc, spu-g++, spu-binutils, ppu-gdb, spu-newlib, etc) which will compile binaries for you.

As far as a proper IDE, the above utilities should integrate fine with about any IDE (i.e. KDevelop, Eclipse CDT, Code::Blocks), so long as you can find syntax highlighting files (available for most popular IDEs). The Cell SDK is available as well, and could potentially provide better integration, and packages are available for RHEL 5.2 and Fedora 9 (should be able to use alien to pull these into Debian/Ubuntu, but not sure on that).

OpenMPI is a fine idea, they've been able to compile it for Cell-based blades (here) so I don't think it should be an issue. You could also roll your own message passing, as low overhead is key in extracting good performance on the Cell (though I don't know how well-suited OpenMPI is for this, it could be great).