low cost development hardware [LWN.net]

low cost development hardware

Posted Nov 11, 2005 1:16 UTC (Fri) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

Yes, a toy, for children to adults. After all aren't computers toys to hackers? That's why they are so attractive, to people from RMS downwards.

How can they be so attractives to gcc developers if it is not fun to play/work on them?

low cost development hardware

Posted Nov 11, 2005 1:24 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

What do you think Playstation 3 is, a toy?

Pretty much. Have you tried to run Eclipse or any other heavy IDE on computer with 256MB RAM ? Not a pretty sight. 256MB PS3 can be used for OpenOffice and may be even for some videoeditiong, but developer platform ? No, it's not it.

Now if SONY will create something like "PS3 Cell Demo" with at least 1GB RAM (preferrably 2GB) - this will be "the thing". Even it'll end up twice as expensive as regular PS3 (XDR is quite expensive AFAIK but SONY is buying in bulk so I think 2GB should cost roughly the same sum for the end user as PS3 itself).

Will this ever happen ? Probably not: SONY missed so many opportunities as of late that one more opportunity lost will by par for the course...

low cost development hardware

Posted Nov 11, 2005 5:31 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I have a full on Gnome desktop with Mono apps like Beagle and Tomboy and it runs fairly acceptable on a AMD 1.4ghz/256meg machine, this is supposed to be a pretty bloated setup. This PS3 should be around the same level of performance for general applications. (even though the powerpc part is 3ghz it is pretty stripped down)

I wouldn't want to run big Java apps on it, though.. Java is notoriously memory hungry. Although I'd bet kdevelop would run on it pretty nicely.

What it would be great for is a multimedia machine. Something that deals with mostly streaming data and games that have been optimized to use 256 megs of RAM. Stuff like that favors more having fast/fat interconnects rather then large amounts of ram.

Also it should be significantly more inexpensive then a average machine, as well as the ability to play all the PS2 games I own, as well as some older PS1, and the newest PS3 games that I will likely own in the future.

In addition it should be quiet too. It should make a nice Linux desktop, and if it gets popular it will probably encourage people further to favor development that is fairly RAM conservative.

And not to mention inexpensive. And also that the majority of computer-using households in America will have one within a couple years simply to run games. The ability to run Linux on it will be just a nice bonus. Being able to run firefox on the HDTV for the kids while dad is on the PC doing taxes maybe attractive way to get the children to f-off.

As for the average "joe-blow".. if people make specialized distros for it it could be very attractive. Stuff like Mythtv (with a seperate inexpensive PC backend in the basement) or could I imagine somebody wanting to use Amarok http://amarok.kde.org/ (if you haven't used it you need to check it out) to handle all their audio needs and sync their music collections on the PS3 up with their Ipods. I think that Amarok would be attractive to the average music buff.

If you setup 'live cds', especially with stuff like PS3 were the hardware is so controlled (every system will be pretty much identical) then you can make it dead easy for even only semi-computer literate people to use Linux. No need to mess around with dmix, or alsa. No need to install software or configure anything.. it's already been taken care of by experts. (I feel that tight control over the hardware it's one of the significant advantages that Apple has with ease-of-install and configuration.)

However on the other hand, I expect for Sony to completely screw it up, as far as making it easy to run Linux on it.

Cross

Posted Nov 11, 2005 6:20 UTC (Fri) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Haven't you ever heard of cross-compilation? Why in the world would you ever want to run Eclipse on your target hardware? (Anyway if you're dependent on Eclipse, you won't be programming a Cell in this decade!) You must already have a nice development machine and environment, and there's no need to give that up. Just take your new PS3 out of the box, plug it into the network, netboot it, and off you go. What, graphics? OK, plug in another monitor, if you insist.

Anyway, it wasn't very long ago that you couldn't even get a disk drive that would hold 256MB. I remember how happy we were to get our first 20MB Seagate drive. (We had to recompile our BSD 2.8 kernel to tell it to stop swapping onto the middle of it!)

Cross

Posted Nov 11, 2005 10:44 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Haven't you ever heard of cross-compilation?

Yes, of course.

Why in the world would you ever want to run Eclipse on your target hardware?

To save money, time and workspace ?

Anyway if you're dependent on Eclipse, you won't be programming a Cell in this decade!

Why not ? AFAIK main programming language for Cell is C and Eclipse have decent C support. I only chose Eclipse since this IBM's software BTW - I'm not big fan of Eclipse myself. If you are talking about JDK availability for Cell - this should not be big deal: IBM is publishing JDK for PPC64 and Cell's PPE is PPC64 with some extensions.

You must already have a nice development machine and environment, and there's no need to give that up. Just take your new PS3 out of the box, plug it into the network, netboot it, and off you go. What, graphics? OK, plug in another monitor, if you insist.

In onther words: keep both your workstation and PS3, spend time and money (office space is not cheap) for two sets of hardware. And so on. Loosers position: that's what Microsoft's rivals said back in 1980th: PC is too underpowered so better to base development on UNIX stations (your developers already own them anyway!) and use cross-compilation. Microsoft was right then and it's true today as well: if your platform is not self-sustained and your rivals platfrom is then you lose by default. Rival to Cell platforum is PC! Both IBM and AMD do plan to implement Cell-like architecture by 2010-2012. For Cell to succeed it needs full self-sutainability by 2007-2008 and some cool applications by 2009-2010. Or else the only result of all this activity will be small footnote in history. I can not see how this self-sustainability can be achieved if the main platform is PC+Cell-based PS3, not just PS3 variant by itself. It's okay to use PC to bootstrap development process (DOS and Windows were developed on UNIX workstations at first) but if you want a lot of developers (especially poor students and other free software public) then better make you platform self-sustained or watch how it becomes irrelevant.

Cross

Posted Nov 11, 2005 20:31 UTC (Fri) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

To be precise, if you're dependent on Eclipse or on Java, you're probably not smart enough to make effective use of a Cell, at least in this decade. Eventually somebody will come up with ways to make its oddities less visible, and access to them more portable.

The main CPU in the Cell is not a heavy lifter when it comes to (e.g.) running compilers. Most Cells will be in embedded gadgets for the next couple of years, so cross-compilation is the natural way to develop for the environments the code must run in. Here's a hint: Cell and its brethren certainly will be just a footnote in history, just as is practically everything in the computing world.

How much space does a PS3 take, anyway? You might as well use it as an X station (besides a development target), and unplug the monitor from your development box. That way you can put your noisy development machine in the basement (presuming you're not already there!) and enjoy the peace and quiet.

Finally, as drag and I both noted, 256MB is lots of RAM by any rational measure. If it's not enough, you're probably either running appallingly fat software, or processing NASA images.

Cross

Posted Nov 12, 2005 1:38 UTC (Sat) by yashi (guest, #4289) [Link]

> Loosers position: that's what Microsoft's rivals said back in 1980th: PC is too underpowered so better to base development on UNIX stations (your developers already own them anyway!) and use cross-compilation. Microsoft was right then and it's true today as well: if your platform is not self-sustained and your rivals platfrom is then you lose by default.

you just don't see cpu market as a whole. what you see, as it seems to me, is just PC and related hardware.

there is more cpu, including cell-like arch, than PC's. sure MS was right that PC is good enogh to host compiler, but you wouldn't want to run your compiler on your tomtom, iPod, or N770 for serious development. time _costs_ more than hardware or real estate.

it'd be nice to have power to self-compile, but the world isn't like that, at least not yet.

> Rival to Cell platforum is PC!

is it?

Cross compilation

Posted Nov 11, 2005 18:04 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

His reply would indicate he has. If he's had to use a cross compilation environment for more than very simple work, I expect he'll look about 30 years older in person than he actually is, and will wince whenever you say "is that a target binary, a host binary, or both?".

Cross compilation is in my limited experience a serious pain. Maintaining a target toolchain is annoying, and many build systems are distinctly unhelpful with cross compilation. If you have the misfortune to need to cross compile software that hasn't been cross-compiled from the beginning, it seems to be remarkably unpleasant much of the time.

Given the choice, if I could run my dev tools on my target, most of the time I'd want to.

Cross compilation

Posted Nov 11, 2005 22:08 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

> will wince whenever you say "is that a target binary, a host binary, or
both?"
>
> Cross compilation is in my limited experience a serious pain

You haven't tried Scratchbox from www.scratchbox.org?

With that you can run on your desktop both target and host binaries,
target binaries are automatically run either in an emulator (currently
Qemu) or if there's not good enough emulation, transparently over the
network on a target system with NFS exported development environment.

For latter, you only need to enable NFS in the target kernel and have a
small daemon running on it. After you've done your development & testing,
you just reboot the target machine with your devel env as it's NFS root
and proceed with system testing (startup etc)...

> If you have the misfortune to need to cross compile software that hasn't
> been cross-compiled from the beginning, it seems to be remarkably
> unpleasant much of the time.

Scratchbox has been developed to handle that kind of a stuff and to even
cross-compile whole distributions. All the autoconf crap works just fine
without any modifications and even cross-building Debian is now possible.
(which is AFAIK impossible with any other tool because of the circular
dependencies in Debian base packages and other problems)

Only things which are a bit of a pain / not always handled automatically
are situations where program wants to compile the same library both as a
host and target binary (e.g. Mozilla), or where as a part of build
process, the target software wants to install a binary extension to a
scripting language (perl, python, m4) which is used also on the
cross-compilation environment as host tool (for speed reasons).

Where's the "PC" in "PPC"?

Posted Nov 17, 2005 20:41 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link]

You're missing the point. The question was: why don't we have cheap low-power fast Cell-based PC hardware available? If we have to develop on a separate x86-based machine, then the PPC is doomed -- at least for free software devs like us, who are scratching our itches on the development machines!