[Discuss-gnuradio] PS3 Success at last

[Robert McGwier]

A month or so ago Eric found a compiler bug that prevented swig and 
python from playing together well on the PS3.

As Eric has told you, we have been working on the kernel and Eric almost 
has the install down pat and documented sufficiently well to tell 
everyone how.  I have been steadily beating on this since my move to the 
University of Maryland campus as I need it for my projects.

I have 2.6.23-rc8 running and alsa-audio working nicely except directly 
in gnuradio.  One needs to add the PS3.conf to /etc/alsa as instructed 
by Lavan on his Cell addons disk and then configure the sound card and 
the audio test works.  We have some little gotcha in the alsa sink that 
I have been unable to find, so I gave up for now.

I had hoped when I introduced portaudio that it would be useful to 
windows and some of the "other" PC's.  It has again. I configured 
portaudio to only support alsa and jack.  I modified a few python audio 
scripts to use the audio_portaudio sink and they work perfectly.

I am not cross compiling yet so it only took 3 hours for gnuradio to 
compile from scratch (!!) on the PS3 but this is enough for me to plug 
up the usrp later today and see what works.

I can see that we will be able to take off and work hard on the PS3 now.

A suggestion for those who are building and installing Lavan's kernel. 
The PS3 runs faster and the footprint is noticably smaller if you 
disable kernel hacking/debug in

make menuconfig.

Lavan's ps3_defconfig is for kernel hackers as they try to debug the faults.

The latest has a fault in that we are back to ps3-boot-game-os and 
reboot not completing resulting in the need to force power off/on to 
reboot but this was sorted out before and worked nicely.

This is a work in progress but I can definitely see work is ready to 
begin in earnest.

Bob

--
AMSAT Director and VP Engineering. Member: ARRL, AMSAT-DL,
TAPR, Packrats, NJQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC. ARRL SDR WG Chair
“An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why
must the pessimist always run to blow it out?” Descartes