Porting of Linux 2.6 to PS2

[deba5er]

@Mega Man

Installed on FAT SCPH-50001/N date code 3C (v9) on the internal HDD. Will experiment more tonight.

[danielb]

I'm in vacation until 8 august...
BUT when i arrive i will test it out!

[deba5er]

It seems to lose partitioning of hdd on reboot, so partman might be having trouble. So no luck yet with install directly to ps2 hdd, will continue testing this evening.

[Mega Man]

I tried to install it on the internal hard disc of a fat PS2. The complete installation was working. I choosed fdisk configuration and standard packages (i.e. 400MB, no server, no desktop). I didn't changed my existing disc partition table, but all partitions should be overwritten. The installation took less than 12 hours. I let it run over night, so I don't know how much faster it can be.
There is a point in the installation where it looks like that there is nothing done for a longer time, but you can see what is happing with ALT+F4. Packets were installed. Use ALT+F1 to get back. With ALT + F2 and ALT + F3 you can get a console for checking. I used a 256 MB swap partition. If the swap space is to small, it can lead to endless swap behaviour.
At the end of the installation there is very important stuff done, like configuring the user accounts. If you missed that, it will be a problem. The step called "base installation" took 1 hour, but this is not really the base installation. The base installation happens when nothing is seen on the screen. So you need to look at the fourth screen (ALT + F4).
Part of the random behaviour of the old version was freezed programs. I think there were endless loops caused by wrong data in instruction cache.

EDIT: It is also possible to use disc 1 (RTE) from Sony's Linux Toolkit to start Linux 2.6 and run the installed system from hard disc. Currently only kernelloader supports initrd with Linux 2.6. So kernelloader is needed to install newer mipsel Linux distributions, but RTE can also be used to run the installed system from the internal hard disc (not USB).
For everybody who wasn't able to get a newer GCC working on PS2: It is already possible to use the gcc 4.3.2 to compile something on the PS2. The code is not optimized for PS2, but it is working. You can install the gcc with the commands:

apt-get update
apt-get install gcc

EDIT2: I did a short test with a 500GB hard disc. Linux 2.6 seems to be able to handle it. It can detect it and can use it. Booting seems to be slower.

[deba5er]

@Mega Man,

Excellent. I also got it to work using fdisk manual partitioning. I am going to retry from scratch to try to use ps2fdisk to pre-create the partitions, then run the installer. I did not know about the <ALT>-F4, so now I can check the install progress, as it appeared to be hung up. I'll repartition using 256MB swap and a 20GB partition, then run the lenny installer initrd using the pre-built partitions. I did not crash once, nor segfault, nor illegal instruction, nor ANY ERROR AT ALL, in the MANY commands I tested. This is amazing!

[danielb]

Anyone tryed already NFS root?

[deba5er]

@danielb

Not yet. I'm testing the hdd install and ps2fdisk did not work because the 2.6 kernel is not APA partitioning aware. So I still want to reinstall to hdd using regular Debian fdisk and get that working this week. But Slim PSTwo has the most to gain from this project because USB is apparently very stable, so my hdd experiments are mostly to see the performance, memory usage, etc.

[Mega Man]

I just want to remind you that there is the apascan tool at https://github.com/chewi/apascan. The tool is able to mount APA partitions in Linux 2.6. I didn't enabled CONFIG_BLK_DEV_DM in test file version 6, so it will not work with it. I believe for ps2fdisk there is more required to get it working.

[deba5er]

@Mega Man

Got it. Nothing crucial at this point, just wanted to be able to use the hdd for both games and linux like with 2.4. However, way bigger fish to fry right now so no big deal ;-) I'm doing another install tonight with just linux partitions and hopefully all will be well by morning.

EDIT - reloaded, working fine from hdd, and doing some more experimenting. Removed some startup items to reduce memory use. I wonder if something like compcache would work well on the PS2? I loaded gcc 4.3.2, too late to play around much. So what is the next step, video frame buffer? Amazing stuff.

[danielb]

So, everything that runs in the console is working well??
Theres many thinks to run in console!