[Ukfreebsd] FreeBSD/PowerPC now supports the PS3

[Bruce Cran]

On Sat, 8 Jan 2011 21:04:40 +0000
"Sevan / Venture37" <venture37 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 8 January 2011 19:53, Dr Joe Karthauser <joe at tao.org.uk> wrote:
> > Are they supporting the cells with the port, or just the main
> > processor? I imagined that it was the latter.
> 
> No idea what is supported & not, didn't post dmesg output :(
> I mistakenly assumed the cell processor was a variant of powerpc.

It's only the main processor (PPE) that's PowerPC - albeit one not
designed to run a general-purpose OS due to the lack of branch
prediction etc.  The 8 SPEs are SIMD CPUs which have 64KB local memory
and no direct access to main memory - the program that's running on the
PPE has to send data to the SPE via the Element Interconnect Bus (EIB)
using DMA. 
So once the general-purpose OS is installed all you have ready access
to is a processor that runs like something from 10 years ago.

-- 
Bruce Cran