Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] PlayStation 3

[Philip Balister]

On 1/17/07, Eric Blossom <address@hidden> wrote:
> In general, is OE the answer, or are there other cross development
> environments that we should be looking at?  It looks like OE was
> designed to solve the "build an entire system image, including kernel,
> boot loader, etc".  That may be overkill for the PS3.  On the other
> hand, if OE solves the "configure in the cross development
> environment", then maybe it is the easiest way to get going.

I am aware of at least a couple other cross systems; buildroot and
crosstools. Buildroot generates complete images, much like OE, but is
allegedly simpler to get styarted with. The problem with buildroot is
targetting multiple hardware targets. I also think it is more oriented
to the uclibc guys. Crosstools manages cros compilers and maybe
libraries. Disclaimer: I've chateed with a couple of guys who like
buildroot and knwo very little about crosstools :)

I've been using OE to build images form the TI Omap Starter Kit (OSK)
based on the OSSIE SCA work we do at VT. Recently I received one of
the EFIKA boards. (The OSK is ARM based, EFIKA is powerpc). I was able
to produce images for the EFIKA based on my existing work for the OSK
within a few days. Most of the time spent working on the EFIKA was
going through issues setting up OE for the EFIKA, and concerned with
how to build OSSIE.

The EFIKA actually has a reasonable amount of RAM and a hard drive, so
I took a quick look at building GNU radio for it. OE already has
support for boost, cppunit, and the other GNU Radio dependencies. I
added support for FFTW (it builds, not sure how well it works yet).
At this point, there are some isses with the configure script locating
cppunit.

Why use OE even though it seems like overkill?

OE provides a complete environment for cross work. It manages the
entire tool chain automatically. This means that two people working on
GNU Radio for the PS3 have a chance of having the same problems :) GNU
Radio is a complex piece of software that depends on several tools and
libraries to build. Managing your local cross enviroment by hand will
become painfull. You will need to extract some libraries from whatever
distro you run on the PPC and cross build copies of libraries that are
not provided. And be very carefully with build paths.

> Ultimately with the cell, I suspect that we need a "dual
> cross-compilation" environment since you need two tool chains
> installed, one for the PPE and one for the SPE.

I need to solve a similar problem for the OMAP. I suspect cross
building for the SPE's (and DSP's) will be a little easier, since
there will be less package dependencies to manage and everyone is
building cross for them anyway. Long term I have some thoughts about
how to integrate "coprocessor" builds into the OE structure.

Philip