forums.ps2dev.org

[citronalco]

MANY links point to this site but it is offline now.

[deba5er]

@citronalco

Chewi is still around, but I don't think he does PS2 development anymore. Here's his coding webpage (with apascan for PS2) - http://github.com/chewi/

If you need something other than apascan, he might even still be checking in once in awhile.

[jimparis]

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://gps2.aura-online.co.uk/

[Chewi]

Still alive. :) The site went down because of a hard drive failure. I'm not sure where all these links are, Google doesn't seem to find many! But for what it's worth, I've configured my web server to redirect to the archive.org copy since they did a very good job of preserving it. You may need to wait for the DNS to propagate.

My feeling is that most of this information is outdated. It mainly talks about the difficulties in working with the Sony RTE but now we have MegaMan's loader. We also have that new exploit (forgotten its name) that lets you add items to the boot menu. That could open up some more options.

If it's the patches you want and you're really serious about working on this then let's talk. I don't have the time to take this forward by myself anymore but if someone knowledgable took it up, I'd be happy to help out. I couldn't help but notice that mrbrown poked his head in here a few months ago but I'm not sure whether he'd be willing to help at this point.

[whig]

Chewi, which is the least old, most reliable gcc?

[Chewi]

For homebrew, there's only ever been 3.2.2. For Linux, it's still 3.0.4. My stuff never worked very well.

[misfire]

Chewi, could you please post the patches you've done so far to port gcc 4 to PS2? Even though they are not perfect, I'm really interested in your groundbreaking work. Maybe I can contribute something too.

Thank you.

[ragnarok2040]

I tried to update his latest patches to a recent version of gcc/binutils over a year ago, but I've been so busy :D. I lost the patches a while ago in an unfortunate ext4 mishap, but I have a svn repository of the patched sources at Sourceforge.

I haven't really done much but apply the patches and try to update them for the updated versions. I'm pretty sure binutils/gcc for IOP compiles, but I forgot if the compiled code didn't work or if it was segfaulting. I haven't tested the DVP/EE toolchain.

The sources are based on binutils-2.19 and gcc-4.3.2.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ps2toolchain/

I can add you as a project administrator, if you have a sourceforge account.

[misfire]

Thanks ragnarok2040, I extracted the IOP patches with diff:
http://pastie.org/893214
http://pastie.org/893221

However, your EE sources seem to be unpatched.

[ragnarok2040]

Ahhh, yeah, I remember now. I first committed vanilla sources for gcc/binutils for each toolchain, and was planning on applying the patches as the first commit. I was trying to get the IOP toolchain working first before working with the EE toolchain. I do know the EE gcc patch applies cleanly to 4.3.1 and applies to 4.3.2 with some fuzz. I'm not sure about the EE binutils/DVP binutils patches but I think they work with 2.16.1. I thought I'd uploaded the patches separately in a tarball as a file, but I guess not, or they were deleted during an upgrade.

Sorry about that, :/.

I had such a hassle finding somewhere to host such a large project, too. I tried Googlecode, using separate projects, and their servers kept erroring out in middle of the svn merge. Each time wasting ~200 MB's of bandwidth. Everywhere else that I looked had size limits of <500 MB per user while the entire repository weighed in at almost a gigabyte. Sourceforge came through in the end, :D.

I upgraded the IOP patch to binutils-2.19 by separating out the different diffs and applying each one manually. I compared to the patched older version of binutils to make sure of the context. I had it compiling, and gcc compiling, but I was getting segfaults when it came to linking the IRX file. That's when I realized I had no debug symbols in any of my installed libraries, so GDB wasn't working correctly. I think I traced the problem back to the irx.em file, but I can't remember anything more specific. I decided to take a break and work on other things for a while.

Shortly after that, my ps2dev directory was deleted as well as my backup directory (rm -r U+FFFD x 6 was transcoded into ISO-8859-1 rm -r ??????) deleting my ps2dev directory and the majority of my backup directory where I had the patches stored.

[misfire]

"I do know the EE gcc patch applies cleanly to 4.3.1 and applies to 4.3.2 with some fuzz."

I guess you've deleted this patch too?

Thanks for the information so far.

[ragnarok2040]

Yeah, it was deleted as well, along with 6 or 7 years' worth of stored code I'd reuse occasionally and dev notes I'd written. I had the majority of that backed up on disc, but not anything that was WIP or designated for a planned backup like the patches. I should probably remove the ee/dvp directories in that svn repository since they're just vanilla binutils-2.19 and gcc-4.3.2.

Hopefully, Chewi has the patches backed up somewhere.

Other than that, it might be a good idea to start somewhat from scratch again. When I looked at the source for gcc-4.3.1 and gcc-4.3.2, before patching, I thought adding r5900 support would be easier since some of the functionality that had to be added to binutils/gcc-3.2.2 to support the r5900 is actually used by other MIPS processors now. Chewi knows more about that than I do, though.

[Chewi]

Sorry, this place never notifies me of new messages for some reason. I still have all my work.

For binutils, I had patched up to 2.16.1. At the time, the latest was 2.17 so this was more than sufficient. The latest version now is 2.20. I don't know for sure but I'd guess that 2.16.1 is still sufficient. A Gentoo user known as garlicbread attempted to patch 2.17 but said he ran into problems. I don't remember what they were but given that his own patch against 2.16.1 didn't even work, maybe you shouldn't be too put off.

For the DVP, binutils is all you need. In fact, the DVP patch has barely changed since its original release. It may or may not apply just as easily to the latest version but it's not very important so I wouldn't bother.

I haven't checked it line for line but the IOP patches posted above should be the same as my latest ones. With it being a vanilla R3000, the changes to GCC were minimal. The bulk of the changes to binutils were actually for IRX support rather than the processor itself. It's worth noting that this newer toolchain appeared to be working perfectly for the IOP. I never encountered any problems using IRXs built with it, together with R5900 code built using the older toolchain.

Of course, the R5900 is the bastard in all of this. ;) I'll write about that later. I will also get these patches up for you ASAP. Ideally I'd like to clear up some of the mess and add some helpful comments to the patches but I'm in the middle of crunch time with my work so it may have to wait a little.

[ragnarok2040]

Yeah, the binutils-2.19 patch is pretty much the same as the binutils-2.16.1 patch. The binutils developers changed a few things around like some names of structures and such, which affected the irx.em file, and a line here or there needed some tweaking.

I don't think I correctly fixed the irx.em file, though, and it's possible other changes might be needed in binutils, but it should be a matter of debugging it more or less.

[Chewi]

Sounds like it would work. Any of you can try this out with the other older stuff, you don't need to use the same versions across all the CPUs.

It's also important to note that I don't think GCC 4.1 or 4.2 would work with the IOP. For 4.3 onwards, the -fno-toplevel-reorder option is critical. I never tried 4.0 but I read somewhere that it didn't do this kind of reordering.

[misfire]

To be honest, I first got interested in this after reading that Nintendo Wii and Gamecube support has been added to Linux 2.6.33 (http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_33). I was wondering why we don't have something similar for the PS2?

Then I learned that in order to compile a recent kernel, the first hurdle to take is porting gcc 4.x and compatible binutils.

I'm looking forward to your patches.

[Mega Man]

I uploaded the files which I backup. I included a script "build.sh" which I used to build the GCC 4.2 for EE. So there is no gentoo needed for compiling. It only compiles the first stage of GCC (xgcc),

http://rapidshare.com/files/370887748/toolchain-ps2-gcc-4.tar.bz2.html


EDIT:Can someone fix the email.php 324 error on this forum server?

EDIT: Link with more then 10 downloads: http://rapidshare.com/files/370894996/toolchain-ps2-gcc-4.tar.bz2

[ragnarok2040]

Nice, :D.

Thank you, Mega Man, :D.

[citronalco]

@Chewi: I read that you made some kind of minimal patch needed to run a vanilla kernel on the ps2. Do you still have this patch? I'd really like to look at it, I'm especially interested in how ld/sc emulation is done.
I guess you don't have the original Montavista patchset somewhere, have you?

Again: Thank you for the work you have done!

[Chewi]

Yes, I suck. I won't bore you with all the excuses but they include a pregnant wife. I'll put you out of your misery and at least provide something now. This directory currently has patches for the kernel and GCC.

These aren't the original kernel patches from MontaVista. I wish I'd downloaded them when Ed Schouten made them available because they've gone now. He should still be reachable though, try the NetBSD community if you're interested. My patches were weeded out by hand and may or may not be easier to work with than the original ones. The 2.4.17 one appeared to work fine. I then tried to move up to 2.4.20 which more or less worked but seemed to have some signaling problems or something. Both versions have the USB drivers missing because I wanted to clean that area up a bit more but never got round to it. I've been told that dropping in the USB code from the MontaVista kernel works just fine. Note that you should apply these patches against Linux MIPS, not vanilla Linux.

The GCC IOP patch is as-above. The GCC R5900 patch is the real monster. ;) I can't quite remember what state it was in when I last worked on it but I've started to annotate it. I'll upload the annotations when they're ready.

Hope this helps.

[citronalco]

No, you don't suck. Definitely not! You're one of the good guys.