Brent Baude

Well after a battle for the ages, I have now released the 64bit-userland stage4 for PS3. You can find the stage in the experimental section on the Gentoo mirros such as:

http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/cell/wiki/InstallGentooOnPS3

This stage has glibc-2.5, gcc-4.1.1-r1, and binutils-2.17; all very new toolchain components for ppc64 on Gentoo. And like the 32bit-userland stage4, it has X, vim, and fluxbox already compiled and ready to go.

The instructions for installing the stage can be found at:

http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/cell/wiki/InstallGentooOnPS3

I'll be updating the instructions with some additional information and user feedback over the course of the weekend.

32bit and 64-bit userlands

Let me also take a moment to discuss the general difference between 32bit-userland and 64bit-userland as this has seemed to cause confusion with some of our new users and those not familiar with ppc64 proper. Both the 32bit and 64bit-userlands run a 64bit-kernel and kernel modules. In the case of the 32bit-userland, the user-space applications (an example of which could be X, Gnome, Firefox) are 32bit. The 32bit-userland does has enough of a toolchain to create 64bit kernels however. In the case of the 64bit-userland, the kernel and all userland applications are 64bit.

The next question we are getting is which userland is better? I'd be foolish to say anything other than