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unai
n00b
Joined: 28 Feb 2003
Posts: 13
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 Posted: Fri Feb 28, 2003 1:01 pm Post subject: what about PS2 ? |
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| There are allreay a linux port to ps2 and a bsd port an ps2... I thing gentoo would be very appropiate for this platform... |
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-JeaN-
Apprentice
Joined: 25 Nov 2002
Posts: 211
Location: PaRiS :D
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| Posted: Fri Feb 28, 2003 1:07 pm Post subject: |
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If you have a linux port for ps2, i don't see what would make it impossible to import portage in it and then use it like gentoo ?  |
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unai
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Joined: 28 Feb 2003
Posts: 13
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| Posted: Fri Feb 28, 2003 5:06 pm Post subject: |
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| I have problens even oinstalling gentoo on my standar pc, and I dont have the linux kit for the ps2... If I knew its possible running gentoo may be I'll give it a try.... |
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garlik42
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Location: Connecticut USA by the water ...
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| Posted: Fri Feb 28, 2003 8:59 pm Post subject: I installed slackware on a ps/2 years ago |
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I have a PS2 Mod 70 that I used to run slackware on, no cdrom drive so I used floppies. It installed just fine it was a tad slow though with it's 66mhz 486 and 16 meg of ram.
If the gentoo disk boots on your ps/2 (I don't know if microchannel support is built into the boot kernel) you should be fine. |
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Kumba
Developer
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Posts: 393
Location: Sigma 957
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| Posted: Fri Feb 28, 2003 9:31 pm Post subject: Re: I installed slackware on a ps/2 years ago |
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| garlik42 wrote: | I have a PS2 Mod 70 that I used to run slackware on, no cdrom drive so I used floppies. It installed just fine it was a tad slow though with it's 66mhz 486 and 16 meg of ram.
If the gentoo disk boots on your ps/2 (I don't know if microchannel support is built into the boot kernel) you should be fine. |
Umm, I think the topic was inquiring about the Sony Playstation 2....
//------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anyways, I'm attempting to accquire a PS2 for cheap, and then the linux kit and am going to try and get Gentoo to run on this device. The PS2 is based on a MIPS R5900 Processor, with modifcations by Sony to create their EmotionEngine architecture. The machine belongs in the "mipsel" class of the MIPS family, making it a Little Endian machine.
Given the luck I've had with installing Gentoo on a SGI Indigo2 (Big-Endian MIPS machine), I'm hoping to be able to apply this knowledge to getting Gentoo onto a PS2 once I get ahold of the unit and the linux kit.
Th only catch points for this will be the PS2's lack of a usable 2.4 linux kernel. The PS2 Linux kit releases with a 2.2.1 kernel, which is quite outdated, however the PS2 Linux site has a 2.2.21 kernel available for download as well. I've also stumbled across a SourceForge project whose CVS has a 2.4.8 kernel that supposedly works for the PS2, but until I can actually get a PS2 Linux system up and running, I have no way of verifying this.
Only time will tell...
--Kumba
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--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic |
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cylgalad
Veteran
Joined: 18 Apr 2003
Posts: 1327
Location: France
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| Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2003 10:45 am Post subject: |
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 do you plan to compile gentoo on a 32 MB 294 MHz machine ? Good luck  |
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Loial
n00b
Joined: 24 Mar 2003
Posts: 29
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| Posted: Mon May 12, 2003 8:14 pm Post subject: |
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that's not too bad tho 
i'm running Gentoo on a 486 with 12mb, and that works too!
I would really love to see how far Kumba can get. I've read your posts on the playstation2-linux.com forum. What's up with the ps2l kit, have you got one yet? |
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hook
Veteran
Joined: 23 Oct 2002
Posts: 1398
Location: Ljubljana, Slovenia
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| Posted: Tue May 13, 2003 7:22 am Post subject: |
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ok, maybe i'm misinformed, but isn't PS2 a 128bit system? ...so i don't think that a 486 and a PS2 install can be really rightfully compared
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scriptkiddie
l33t
Joined: 30 Mar 2003
Posts: 955
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 4:30 pm Post subject: |
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| ps2 is a 128 meg machine which can be upgraded to 256... read on warez |
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Kumba
Developer
Joined: 16 Jul 2002
Posts: 393
Location: Sigma 957
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 6:16 pm Post subject: |
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afaik, the PS2 has 32mb of ram only. It's the development system, DTL 10000 which has 128MB of ram. Not sure if either machine is upgradable. I reckon the dev system probably is, but the consumer level machine is probably fixed. I'll have to look at the PS2 Mainboard I have at home, there might be solder pads for extra memory chips, but even if there are, soldering new chips on is not an easy task.
--Kumba
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"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic |
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scriptkiddie
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Joined: 30 Mar 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 6:25 pm Post subject: |
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thats right..
xbox has 64
gamecube has 40
ps2 has 32
dreamcast has 20
I was thinking 128 bit gaming  |
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daSilVetZ
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Joined: 28 Apr 2003
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Location: CT
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 7:29 pm Post subject: |
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| gentoo on the ps2 would rock most definitly. |
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scriptkiddie
l33t
Joined: 30 Mar 2003
Posts: 955
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2003 7:31 pm Post subject: |
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| I'm highly tempted to start a port for it.. but I need to do some research on it first |
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daSilVetZ
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Joined: 28 Apr 2003
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| Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2003 10:06 pm Post subject: |
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im pondering on trading my PS2 for an xbox, only because i want to install gentoo on it.. but if we could get gentoo working on the PS2.. wow that would be just awesome. Doesn't gentoo support the MIPS architecture, i think i recall reading it somewhere.. Plus if a debian clone (Black Rhino) works on it, why not gentoo?
Edit: I found an interesting Gentoo on MIPS Installation Guide, which includes the following note: | Quote: | | The Playstation 2 is a specialized MIPS system, using an R5900 MIPS processor. The support for this processor is extremely limited, and only found in the development toolchains available in the PS2 Linux Kit and via some patches available on the PS2 Linux Homepage. As a result of this, it is not supported in Gentoo at this time. |
the guide was written on the 1st of March, maybe things have now changed, or maybe the research and testing didn't go far enough.. The only positive thing is the fact that the processor support is atleast "extremely limited" and not plainly "unsupported"...
2nd Edit: I just realised the guide was written by Kumba, who has posted in this thread, If you read this, as there been any progress? Thx
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Raide
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Joined: 13 Aug 2003
Posts: 27
Location: State College, PA
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| Posted: Sat Aug 16, 2003 10:20 pm Post subject: |
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| in regard to this post at slashdot is there a possibility that a gentoo liveCD could be made to boot on a PS2 that had an appropriate memory card? |
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Kumba
Developer
Joined: 16 Jul 2002
Posts: 393
Location: Sigma 957
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| Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2003 7:20 am Post subject: |
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| daSilVetZ wrote: | im pondering on trading my PS2 for an xbox, only because i want to install gentoo on it.. but if we could get gentoo working on the PS2.. wow that would be just awesome. Doesn't gentoo support the MIPS architecture, i think i recall reading it somewhere.. Plus if a debian clone (Black Rhino) works on it, why not gentoo?
Edit: I found an interesting Gentoo on MIPS Installation Guide, which includes the following note: | Quote: | | The Playstation 2 is a specialized MIPS system, using an R5900 MIPS processor. The support for this processor is extremely limited, and only found in the development toolchains available in the PS2 Linux Kit and via some patches available on the PS2 Linux Homepage. As a result of this, it is not supported in Gentoo at this time. |
the guide was written on the 1st of March, maybe things have now changed, or maybe the research and testing didn't go far enough.. The only positive thing is the fact that the processor support is atleast "extremely limited" and not plainly "unsupported"...
2nd Edit: I just realised the guide was written by Kumba, who has posted in this thread, If you read this, as there been any progress? Thx :) |
Not much has changed (except for my cable modem IP address for the first time in a year...). Gentoo/MIPS support is really limited to the SGI machines, and of those, really only tested on Indy and Indigo2 (R4x00 Only, no R8K/R10K), although there is work on getting it onto an SGI o2.
Mipsel support, which means something like the Cobalt RaQ/Qube systems is halted cause of tulip issues (Tulip is the driver that powers the NIC on the RaQ). It likes to hang up after ~45seconds of network usage, although I have gotten gentoo installed overtop of debian on it.
Since PS2 is also Mipsel, it is possible generic mipsel binaries might run on it, but I'm not sure. $200 for a linux kit is a bit pricey for me, especially one with some pretty-outdated tools. I'm not sure if a general, modern gcc could generate usable PS2 binaries, or if that gcc would need patching for the R5900 processor.
If anyone has a PS2 and wants to try, go ahead. I'd love to hear *any* information on it, since all my remarks are merely untested theories.
| Raide wrote: | | in regard to this post at slashdot is there a possibility that a gentoo liveCD could be made to boot on a PS2 that had an appropriate memory card? |
This would probably not be likely. Taking advantage of a security gap like that would probably, somehow, constitute running illegal code on the PS2, and thus making linux work in that way wouldn't make it "legal". Similar issues I believe of this nature were raised in putting Gentoo on the X-Box, although I believe the issues have now been worked around. IANAL, but the only way to legally do Gentoo Linux on a PS2 is via the Linux kit.
--Kumba
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brackenhill_mob
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Joined: 17 Jul 2002
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Location: Berkhamsted, Herts, UK
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| Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2003 5:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Mipsel support, which means something like the Cobalt RaQ/Qube systems is halted cause of tulip issues (Tulip is the driver that powers the NIC on the RaQ). It likes to hang up after ~45seconds of network usage, although I have gotten gentoo installed overtop of debian on it.
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I've got 2 original RaQs, one of which is our corporate mail/web server running Debian which I hate as all our other boxen run Gentoo
So ...
Where are we at with a mipsel port? If the Tulip driver is the problem, how do we fix it? I'd like to get involved in this port as my goal is to have the Debian RaQ replaced with a Gentoo one (running the 2.6 test kernel?).
Philip |
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Kumba
Developer
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Posts: 393
Location: Sigma 957
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| Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 10:12 am Post subject: |
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| Philip de Lisle wrote: | I've got 2 original RaQs, one of which is our corporate mail/web server running Debian which I hate as all our other boxen run Gentoo :D
So ...
Where are we at with a mipsel port? If the Tulip driver is the problem, how do we fix it? I'd like to get involved in this port as my goal is to have the Debian RaQ replaced with a Gentoo one (running the 2.6 test kernel?).
Philip |
No one's figured out a solution to the tulip driver yet. I don't know enough about the tulip driver and the kernel in general to know how to fix it. Qube's can skirt this issue because they have a spare PCI slot which can accomodate an additional NIC card that could be used instead of Tulip. I don't have a Qube however to test this theory out and build mipsel stuff off of it.
As for the 2.6 kernel, that is a no go as Cobalt's have a limit of about ~675-680KB on the size of a gzip -v9 compressed kernel image. The smallest I've ever been able to get a 2.6 kernel is about 750KB. The only way a 2.6 kernel will work is if someone managed to code a bootloader that can be booted by the cobalt firmware, and then boot a kernel off the disk. NetBSD has a one-stage bootloader made, but I am unsure if it can be adapted for linux usage. If anyone has the skill, or the motivation and wants to give it a shot, the netbsd bootloader can be found here:
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/sys/arch/cobalt/stand/boot/
--Kumba
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"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic |
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brackenhill_mob
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Joined: 17 Jul 2002
Posts: 62
Location: Berkhamsted, Herts, UK
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| Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 12:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Kumba wrote: | | No one's figured out a solution to the tulip driver yet. |
Is it worth taking a look at Debian's source? On my boxen running 2.4.18, the Tulip driver is 0.9.15-pre9 and has a message in dmesg stating "Old format EEPROM on 'Cobalt Microserver' board. Using substitute media control info". It's been working great for over 15 months as our mail/web server.
| Kumba wrote: | | As for the 2.6 kernel, that is a no go as Cobalt's have a limit of about ~675-680KB on the size of a gzip -v9 compressed kernel image |
I read somewhere that there is a way to flash the BIOS to increase this value, but a) I can't find it now (it may have been on the lists.cobalt.com server which doesn't seem to respond any more and b) I can't remember if this only applied to x86 RaQs. Is it worth me digging around on this to see what I can come up with?
Philip |
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Kumba
Developer
Joined: 16 Jul 2002
Posts: 393
Location: Sigma 957
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| Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 4:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Philip de Lisle wrote: | | Kumba wrote: | | No one's figured out a solution to the tulip driver yet. |
Is it worth taking a look at Debian's source? On my boxen running 2.4.18, the Tulip driver is 0.9.15-pre9 and has a message in dmesg stating "Old format EEPROM on 'Cobalt Microserver' board. Using substitute media control info". It's been working great for over 15 months as our mail/web server. |
2.4.18, the kernel and tulip driver worked fine. Starting in 2.4.19 is when the issues started to appear. In the latest 2.4.22 linux-mips.org CVS code, this issue becomes very apparent, as even using ssh for several seconds will knock the driver out. The odd thing is it isn't totally dead. The driver will still respong, but with about a ping time of ~3 minutes, which is hideously slow.
The issue was first discovered on the debian-mips ML, and no one ever bothered to respond to the original poster.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-mips/2003/debian-mips-200305/msg00040.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-mips/2003/debian-mips-200305/msg00073.html
If you dig through their archives for the following months, you'll see some other people respond with similar issues.
| Philip de Lisle wrote: | | Kumba wrote: | | As for the 2.6 kernel, that is a no go as Cobalt's have a limit of about ~675-680KB on the size of a gzip -v9 compressed kernel image |
I read somewhere that there is a way to flash the BIOS to increase this value, but a) I can't find it now (it may have been on the lists.cobalt.com server which doesn't seem to respond any more and b) I can't remember if this only applied to x86 RaQs. Is it worth me digging around on this to see what I can come up with? |
From what I've been told in #mipslinux on Freenode, the home of linux-mips development, Bacchus (Ralf Baechle) says the limit is more or less a hardware limit. It's the point at which uncompressed data starts overwriting compressed data. So flashing the bios to get a larger size is probably something that only applies to the x86 cobalts.
The cobalt firmware itself is a horribly mauled linux kernel with some extra code. I believe a 2.1.x series kernel backported to 2.0.34 for stability. The link below is a link to a 2.0.34 kernel tree which has indications of double as a source tree for a cobalt kernel and as the cobalt bootloader kernel, however I've poked through it and aside from the #ifdef BOOTLOADER bits, I can't find anything that seems to be specific to the bootloader. I'm probably missing it, or that tree needs another tool or source code package to be complete.
ftp://ftp-eng.cobalt.com/pub/users/thockin/cobalt-linux-2.0.34C53_SK.tar.gz
Further linux-mips stuff, like access to anoncvs can be found on www.linux-mips.org. There's a patch for the tulip driver which adds cobalt media support at Paul Martin's website:
http://people.debian.org/~pm/mips-cobalt/kernel/
I also have a patch from Karsten Merker which also adds cobalt support and fixes the serial driver on cobalt in 2.4.21+ kernels on this site:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~kumba/mips/cobalt-diff-against-cvs-20030828.diff
Niether patch fixes the tulip driver of course, so unless you stick with a 2.4.18 kernel or 2.4.17 kernel, you're stuck in the mud as far as cobalt goes. (The 2.4.18 source used to build the debian kernel you use has never been located, people always find 2.4.17 source).
--Kumba
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"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."
--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic |
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brackenhill_mob
n00b
Joined: 17 Jul 2002
Posts: 62
Location: Berkhamsted, Herts, UK
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| Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2003 4:51 pm Post subject: |
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Wow, you sure know how to put a dampner on things
I guess I'll have to stick with my Debian build as I doubt I have the necessary skills to take it further given the mess that you've just described.
Pity as my "bluey's" are great little boxen and I'm very fond of them!
Philip |
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Promit
Guru
Joined: 15 Nov 2003
Posts: 344
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| Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2003 3:29 am Post subject: |
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Can't we work on getting some sort of basic LiveCD for the PS2? It wouldn't need to support all the stuff you can do with a PS2, it would just be a free and easy way of getting some sort of Linux running. Maybe one of the MIPS Gentoo LiveCD's can be modified?
I don't know what I'm talking about, of course.
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Windows, Linux, whatever. |
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Peach
Advocate
Joined: 08 Mar 2003
Posts: 3686
Location: London, UK
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| Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2003 12:23 am Post subject: |
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| Promit wrote: | Can't we work on getting some sort of basic LiveCD for the PS2? It wouldn't need to support all the stuff you can do with a PS2, it would just be a free and easy way of getting some sort of Linux running. Maybe one of the MIPS Gentoo LiveCD's can be modified?
I don't know what I'm talking about, of course. |
maybe the new gentoo linux 2004 will help in making such things, thanks to catalyst as seen in this announcement!
should we espect more from the future? (of course yes  )
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Promit
Guru
Joined: 15 Nov 2003
Posts: 344
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| Posted: Thu Dec 18, 2003 12:26 am Post subject: |
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I don't get how that pushes along a LiveCD at all...maybe I'm just missing something...
I should probably poke around the Knoppix forums, maybe there's someone who can create a Knoppix for PS2.
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Kumba
Developer
Joined: 16 Jul 2002
Posts: 393
Location: Sigma 957
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| Posted: Thu Dec 18, 2003 6:46 pm Post subject: |
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| Promit wrote: | I don't get how that pushes along a LiveCD at all...maybe I'm just missing something...
I should probably poke around the Knoppix forums, maybe there's someone who can create a Knoppix for PS2. |
I doubt you'll find a Knoppix cd or any kind of a LiveCD for the PS2. Linux on PS2 runs inside of a specialized run-time environment (RTE) Sony developed. Inside the RTE, linux cannot access the PS2's dvd drive, so booting off CD is impossible, and trying to boot any CD other than the RTE will not work as far as trying to run Linux.
--Kumba
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Gentoo on Alternative Architectures
