Saturday, April 7, 2007

Kernel Upgrade


After I upgraded my Cell SDK to version 2.1, I decided it was time to upgrade the kernel as well. Stock releases of the linux kernel are not yet working properly on the PS/3. Also, the 2.6.20 PS/3 kernel that comes with Ubuntu/Feisty would not boot properly for me. The trick is to use GIT to get a development tree as described by Julipedia. I opted to build and install via a proper deb-package. The key here is to get the latest version of kernel-package from Debian's unstable repository, as kernel-package 10.068 has fixed the bug that would mess up make-kpkg commands in GIT source trees. I found that luckily, my ray tracer code would build without problems on the 2.1 SDK. Although I somewhat expected this, as it is standard policy to increase major version numbers when breaking APIs, and this was a minor version number upgrade only. What pleased me less, is that they did not bother to apply the fix I sent to the forums for the triangle intersection bug. The bug is still in there, which is somewhat sloppy I think.