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

Matthew Scarpino's book, Programming the Cell Processor, is pretty up to date and has a lot of good information. Also, the website for the book has a lot of example code available for download.

There was also an MIT course on parallel programming via the Cell processor that has some good info, although some of it is out of date, namely, it uses the old cell mechanics where libspe provided its own threads. With the newest version of the library, you will need to get your threads from elsewhere (pthreads, boost, whatever) in order to run parallel programs.

As for OS and compiler, I've been using Yellow Dog Linux 6.1. YDL has worked out pretty well so far, much better than Fedora 9 anyway, although that is likely a result of the fact that YDL comes with a super-lightweight window manager and Fedora 9 doesn't. I had a few problems with networking, but those are most likely a product of the slightly bizarre network environment that I have the system set up in.

Once I had YDL up and running, I then installed the cell sdk fedora packages on top of (this takes a little bit of work, as the cellsdk install script falsely recognizes YDL as RHEL, not Fedora). YDL does have most of the SDK available in one of their package repos, but by default not much of it is installed, just the compilers (of course, I didn't figure this out until I had already hacked the IBM installer to do the right thing). I'm just using the basic IBM compilers (not the XL stuff).

There is also a ton of information scattered around the IBM site, but it can be a bit hard to make sense of.