OS X on The PS3

[vbetts]

If you want more proof of this, the first demos of the 360s were played on a G5 with a 6800. Emulated, no aa, af, or enhancements though at all.

[Rob G]

So I would have a better chance of getting it to work on an xbox 360. That Sucks, Because To install another os on the 360 it HAS TO be modded and void warranty and the PS3 Doesnt. I Have A Modded 360, If anyone knows where to start i will Try it. I have never installed another OS on an xbox before.

[wolrah]

The Cell's PPE is basically a PowerPC. The problem is that it's nothing special if you're just using the PPE. The SPEs are what makes the Cell worth using, and they're a completely different beast. Without full source, don't expect to be able to run anything on them. At best, if the PPE has a full enough PowerPC implementation, you might get performance on par with a base model G4 Mac Mini.

 

The reason we bored geeks run Linux and/or BSD on everything is because we have the source, so for the most part it's a matter of a bootloader, a few drivers, and some debugging. Making something work on an unfamiliar platform when you don't have the source requires either emulation (slow) or serious hacking after which you'd practically have your own OS anyways. It would not run any binaries that hadn't been converted through the same painstaking process.

[QckSlvrGuyInKC]

You'd have better luck running Jaguar or Panther than you would Tiger on PS3 hardware, simply because Tiger on PPC is inefficient with less than 384 MB of system RAM while Jaguar and Panther could both easily and comfortably run on 128 MB. Also, there's a lot more source available for the older versions since the mothership seems to consider anything more than 2 versions old "dead" these days...should make creating a bootloader easier...

 

Back to the Cell processor and RSX graphics chip - From everything I read when the PS3 came out, the main processing element is a PPC970 with stripped down cache and alti-vec capabilities, and the RSX video chip is based on nVidia's G71 with similar performance to the 7800GS or 7800GT. Since Darwin Kernel would have to be massively reprogrammed to take advantage of the additional features of the Cell, OS X Jaguar or Panther running on a PS3 would probably be around the same speed as Jaguar or Panther running on a dual-processor Power Mac G4 or iMac G5 1.6; Tiger would probably take a 30% performance hit over Panther because of the memory issue, and Leopard would be in swapfile hell.

 

EDIT(s) - bad quote and answered my own question reading the posts again. Damn sleep deprivation.

[NeoMasterPT]

cell is like a fusion off 4*G4 cpu for controlling hardware and internal cpu functions; a G5 for controlling the G4s and the 6 Cores

 

 

so its like getting the MacOs to work on a 6Core G5 and a 4Core G4 at the same time

[(MoC)]

Honestly whoever wants to do this is stupid and really doesn't know that they need to do a hell of a lot work just to get the kernel to boot and panic because of hardware limitations. Listen to netkas, Headrush69, SticMAN, and everybody else that's telling you to cut the {censored} because it's just not possible. You have to do a hell of a lot of work to make the boot loader and a sh!tload of drivers. Not happening.

[netkas]

u forgot to mention platformexpert for ps3, tons of work

[Azurael]

cell is like a fusion off 4*G4 cpu for controlling hardware and internal cpu functions; a G5 for controlling the G4s and the 6 Cores

so its like getting the MacOs to work on a 6Core G5 and a 4Core G4 at the same time

 

I hate to ask, but what the heck are you on about?

 

For all intents and purposes with regard to running OS X, the Cell processor in the PS3 consists of a single central processing core, the 'PPE', which is compatible with the POWER instruction set with an AltiVec unit tacked on (so bar a couple of minor functional differences, it's instruction set compatible with a G5.) However, due to hardware differences such as a lack of instruction scheduling units, it will never even come close to matching the performance of a G5 for the execution of code which is not optimised for the architectural differences. It has two hardware threads (like a HyperThreading P4) which allows it to make optimum use of its long pipelines by avoiding too much of a penalty if one pipeline stalls as a result of branch misprediction, but obviously doesn't offer anything like the performance of two real cores.

 

Utterly irrelevant to us, the CPU also has 7 SPEs (in the PS3 implementation - the CBE itself has 8, but one is disabled to improve yields) which are very stripped down RISC cores designed purely for SIMD. Think '7 AltiVec units on steroids' and you wouldn't be far off the mark. However, they would most likely be useless and unaccesable under OS X, unless somebody wants to make the appropriate modifications to the OS at a low level to support them

 

As I've said in another one of these pointless 'I'm going to run Mac OS on X piece of hardware' threads that seem to appear on this forum every ten minutes, OS X on the PS3 is a pointless goal. Once you've written a bootloader to start the Mac OS X kernel on a PS3 (if that is even possible bearning in mind the massive differences in supporting hardware, system firmware, etc.) Then you face the challenge of writing drivers for all the hypervisor virtualised hardware including things like the framebuffer.)

 

One possible avenue is virtualising OS X running on top of Linux. However, Mac-on-Linux doesn't support G5s, AFAIK, and you'll get nowhere with the total available 256MB of RAM on a PS3 shared between host and guest OSes. Even if you could overcome all of these issues, a violated 360 running Linux would make a better target platform for virtualising Mac OS; it has 3x the usable CPU power (put simply, Cell = 1 PPE + 7 SPEs, Xenon = 3 PPEs - although this isn't quite true, the three cores in Xenon share only 512KB of L2 between them), double the usable RAM (the 360 shares it's 512MB of memory between the GPU and CPU, like a PC with integrated graphics, whereas the PS3 has 256MB of dedicated video RAM and 256MB of system RAM.) and the possibility of much better video performance due to not having to go through the hypervisor's framebuffer emulator.

[zeamp]

All this tech talk makes me sleepy.

 

I remember when installing NetBSD on your Sega Dreamcast was the coolest thing in the world. Why can't we let video game consoles be? Sure, it's cool to use your Xbox 360 to check your e-mail or surf porn sites, but does it really justify all the head-banging and extended use of CPU jargon? I only look into consoles when a game isn't available for my far more powerful PC. I'd never try to make the console into a PC. Not with these hardware prices.

[vbetts]

cell is like a fusion off 4*G4 cpu for controlling hardware and internal cpu functions; a G5 for controlling the G4s and the 6 Cores

so its like getting the MacOs to work on a 6Core G5 and a 4Core G4 at the same time

 

No, the cell doesn't have real cores unlike a G5 does.

[!Shaun!]

Lol no point getting it on a ps3 at the end of the day like xbox 360 i believe if you buy it to play games just leave it for that. When it left the production line it wasn't built to run Computer operating system apart from the firmware Sony made for the hardware. Similarly the xbox is the same and the have components optimized for the games not operating systems

Seriously if you want a computer to sit with your PS3 hooked up to your tv buy a mac mini or one of those new mini dells very smart with the bamboo case

Good luck anyway

[Jeezoflip]

i would want this to happen to i can use a batch of ps3's to render final cut footage. it would be so fast.