Linux on Playstation 3 is slow
Running Linux on your Playstation 3 has been possible for two weeks now, but to test how the machine performs with various applications, a benchmark program had to be adapted to run on it. A guy over at Geek Patrol did this and found out the Console is about as fast as a Pentium 3 800MHz, a 6 year old processor.
Above’s statement might sound al little negative, but you should keep in mind that most of the operation systems can’t fully take advantage of Cell’s power and only use one of its SPEs. At this point it’s also impossible to use the RSX, the graphics processor which takes care of all the visuals you see on screen due to restrictions put there by Sony. Not being able to use this chip has a huge impact on anything graphics related. This is also the case with Geekbench, the program which was used to benchmark the Playstation 3. The results were quite terrible as you can see if you scroll down to the results at Geek Patrol, and at this point the Playstation 3 isn’t really suitable for anything else than a machine to play games with or watch Blue-Ray movies. Another side note is that only one guy submitted his results and they might have been a bit inaccurate or perhaps entirely off due to an anomaly of some kind. This is purely speculation and perhaps one of the most important things is that these results have nothing to do with the games on the platform. The benchmark is using applications which aren’t built for the Playstation 3 and most people are probably never going to use them anyway. The only reason a lot of people are taking interest in this sort of thing is that running different operation systems on the Playstation 3 might lead to another ‘Xbox Media Center’ which was an application used by many people with a modded Xbox. The Playstation 3 might be able to perform these media center duties as well, only this time it’s legal.
For the time being, Linux on the PS3 isn’t such a great idea. Perhaps in a couple of months time we’ll see some improvement and some useful applications will appear, but right now it’s not worth the hassle.
With other distros of Linux being announced, some like Gentoo will take better advantage of the PS3 Hardware. With only 256megs of the memory available at this moment to the kernel, things can get bottle-necked quite quickly using the GUI. If nvidia decides to release a 3d driver for is RSX GPU on the PS3 then you will see a huge improvement overall on the PS3 with Linux installed.
Give Linux (any distro) on the PS3 a least one year to really see if Linux is feasible on the PS3.
I have been using Linux for 5 years now, (currently using KANOTIX) and would agree that right now is a bit to soon. It will not be worth giving up 10gig of the hard drive to have a 800mhz system.
I agree. I had YDL running and it took just as long for it to boot up to the GUI as my PII Thinkpad. Firefox was no speed demon either. I don’t know how the PS3 claims to be able to hand “other OS” installations when it runs like hardware from 1998.
If Sony were to release closed source drivers (like nVidia) for their hardware, things would likely speed up, but no matter what drivers you have, they system still only has 256MB of available RAM, which is pitiful and Adobe Flash still doesn’t like Linux-PPC.
Honestly, the system does what it’s designed to do: play pretty HD games and Blu-ray movies. If you want a computer, get a computer (seriously, a $100 computer off eBay will run linux better than the PS3 at this point).
Its working much better now…