Hello Kevin, This list is been pretty quiet lately so I don't really know what is happening on the Linux/MIPS front. I am hoping that work is still slowly proceeding on the DECstation that I have, but I don't really know. I agree with you that PS2 offer enormous power to the developer and as a cheap source of computing power to other countries. I don't know a great deal about it, but I am least willing to discuss it if it will create some additional interest. Todd Smith <todd.smith@camc.org> -----Original Message----- From: Kevin D. Kissell [mailto:kevink@mips.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 10:00 AM To: linux-mips@fnet.fr; linux-mips@oss.sgi.com Subject: Linux and the Sony Playstation 2 The Sony PS2 Linux kit has been shipping for nearly a month now, and I'm frankly astonished at how little I've seen on this mailing list about it. For better or for worse, this changes everything for MIPS/Linux. The number of MIPS/Linux users worldwide has just gone up by at least an order of magnitude, and they are on a platform running a 2.2.1-derived kernel and using gcc 2.95.2. It's a perfectly usable platform out of the box, but Carsten has thrown "crashme" at it, and it goes down relatively quickly. People trying to port kaffe and other programs that do double-precision float are blocked because there's no double precision on the R5900, and the Sony kernel lacks the Algorithmics emulator. It's not clear what Sony is going to put into further development, and what they are going to expect the user community to take over from here. There is a group of people trying to take the kernel up to 2.2.20, but I'm not yet sure whether they know what they are doing, and anyway, that box needs to get to 2.4.x ASAP. I respectfully submit that, within a year, any MIPS/Linux source tree that does not support the PS2 will be considered obsolete. And that quite specifically includes the one at oss.sgi.com. I personally would want to approach this in terms of merging the necessary PS2 code into something that could be expressed as a patch over kernel.org's 2.4.19_or_better, and which would be provded as the default MIPS kernel technology by MIPS and SGI servers, and ultimately by kernel.org. Is no one else here working on this? Regards, Kevin K.
