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 “it just depends....” It depends on what you are doing with it, how much memory you have available, whether you need what 64bit applications offer weighed against 32bit, are the applications you want 64bit stable, and so on. If there was a clear-cut answer on the matter we would only be creating one userland.

What is next

I'm working on updating both the 32 & 64 bit repositories. That will likely be the premise of my next blog post.