Info on another gentoo setup

Hi All,

Just thought some people may be interested in issues and fixes I've encountered in setting up gentoo on my PS3.

First here are the details on the setup.
I'm running the 60gb PS3 (i.e. the only one in the UK).
I've allot 10gb for the gameos and so I've got 50gig for linux.

HD is partitioned as follows
/dev/sda1 /boot 128MB ext3
/dev/sda2 swap 1GB swap
/dev/sda3 / remaining space xfs

I realise this is probably overkill for the amount of swap, but it's not like I was short on hard disk. 512MB is probably more realistic for those who are interested.

I followed pretty much standard procedure as documented in a few places - stage4 64ul tarball. I needed to pull the sources as well and recompile the kernel with XFS compiled in, not as a module.
You'll need to label /dev/sda1 as / even though it's boot - and place your kboot.conf file in /boot/etc/kboot.conf - this is because of the way kboot looks for kboot.conf files. It won't affect your gentoo install as long as you use /dev entries in your fstab.

While I should have been able to run without an initrd I got errors that wouldn't allow it to boot, but with an initrd the machine boots fine. This is the line I used in my kboot.conf (I think - don't have access to my ps3 atm)
gentoo='/dev/sda1:/kernel initrd=/dev/sda1:/initrd root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc real_root=/dev/sda3 video=ps3fb:mode:133'

Now as you've noticed I went for the 64bit userland - this is what I definitely want to go with longer term - have been running 64bit gentoo of ~amd64 for ages and very happy with it. Though media players don't work as well in 64bit on the PS3 as they do in 32bit userland. So this means for the moment I kinda want both. The good news is you can have both. I setup a chroot jail on the same XFS partition I've already got. For those of you who aren't linux people - a chroot jail is like an entire linux environment (as full or as minimal as you like) residing the a directory. You can use it to run other distros as well - so this means I could put a YDL, FC5, Ubuntu or whatever distro I like in a subdirectory on my machine. I chose to just put gentoo 32bit userland. So I made a directory /gentoo32 untarred the stage4 32bit userland tarball into it and then proceeded to mount as required so I could use it.

Once you've got it untarred you need a few things available - you don't technically need a /dev, but you'll want it to be able to access any /dev/* nodes from within 32bit userland. I also wanted to be able to emerge additional applications in there so I made my existing portage directory available to save having two copies of the ebuilds and distfiles hanging around. First let's mkdir /gentoo32/usr/portage (as it doesn't exist yet)
Now let's get things mounted - you'll possibly want to add an init script in your 64bit UL to automate this on boot (and umounting on shutdown).

mount -t proc none /gentoo32/proc
mount -o bind /dev /gentoo32/dev
mount -o bind /usr/portage /gentoo32/usr/portage

This is all the basics you need to start working in your chroot jail, but if you have anything else you want shared then bind it as well - for instance a storage directory you keep things in? mkdir /gentoo32/storage; mount -o bind /storage /gentoo32/storage

Now to chroot into your chroot jail
chroot /gentoo32 /bin/bash

Now you can just operate within there as though you had installed a 32bit userland instead of the 64bit. If you emerge --sync here it'll update your 64bit UL application tree as well (and vice versa) - though installing applications - like emerge vlc will only apply to the userland you're currently in. I've also left /etc/portage separate - this way you can have varying masking and configuration in each UL.

Hope this is useful for someone. My plan is to run with this for now and as soon as there are cell optimizations in ffmpeg then I can just unmount it all and rm -rf /gentoo32 from my 64bit UL and I've freed up the hard drive space used to squeeze a little more performance out for the moment.

Cheers,

Alan.