[mythtv] Porting to Play Station 2

Michael Kedl mythtv-dev@snowman.net
31 Dec 2002 11:44:51 -0500


Having not read your link yet (next to do :-)) I still wonder how much
RAM is available after you are sitting in X at a shell on your PS2.

How can you say the RAM is not an issue if there is 8MB left of main
memory and the current Myth apps + decoder + buffers take 12MB?  I have
no idea what the actual numbers are though. So how much is left on your
Ps2 setup?  and maybe Isaac can tell us how much he thinks the player
needs.  (I assume you are right and "some" things can be swapped to
disk, but you wouldn't want much to swap; I would think you would just
kill off unneeded things to keep swapping down).

Thanks for the reply!  What do you think about the Linux PS2 overall? 
is it worth playing with?

Mike


On Tue, 2002-12-31 at 11:25, Neil Trodden wrote:
> At 10:40 31/12/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> >After reading the Xbox post I thought for a few minutes about my Play
> >Station 2 sitting in the living room; and remembered that Linux is
> >supposed to be available for it.
> >
> >So I'm thinking about making it one of my frontends. It's $200 US, but I
> >want a network adaptor/keyboard/mouse anyway; so I figure thats about
> >$75 of it.  Throw in the 40GB drive and you're paying less than $75 for
> >linux to run on the PS2.  Sounds like fun :-)
> >
> >I imagine I will have to port/recompile a LOT of support packages since
> >I doubt there will be any RPMs available.
> >
> >I think the biggest issue may be the hard limit of 32MB total RAM in a
> >PS2.  After kernel, drivers, and X I'm not sure how much will be left.
> 
> I've got ps2 linux and one of the main issues is moving data around
> under DMA which is critical to getting the most out of the ps2. To DMA,
> you need to access physical memory but there are patches now
> which allow ps2 linux programs to allocate a chunk of physical ram
> for use with DMA without it getting swapped out to disc.
> 
> In short, its not really a problem of too little memory, it's just getting
> the data into it, processed and fed to the video processor.
> 
> I've read that a lot of open source video players don't perform too
> well under ps2 linux and that could be improved a little by optimising the
>   assembly in the players for the ps2. Most applications just weren't
>   written with the ps2's bizarre architecture in mind!
> 
> The porting of most of the mythtv dependencies (and mythtv itself) will
> probably involve just recompiling but there'll be the need for a lot of 
> re-writing
> of existing software to tailor it for the ps2.
> 
> I found this article quite interesting and it demonstrates well the 
> strengths of
> the ps2 plus how it compares to i386-based PC's.
> 
> http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/playstation2/ee-1.html
> 
> ..and there's a thriving dev community at:
> 
> http://playstation2-linux.com/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Neil Trodden
> 
> 
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