[mythtv] Porting to Play Station 2

[Neil Trodden]

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