[Debian-ppc64-devel] Debian for Cell-styled PPCs

[Felix Domke]

Hi,

i'm happily using debian-ppc64 on some of my machines. I'm currently
also working on machines based on the Cell PPU, i.e. an processor which
is unable to do out-of-order processing of instructions. Because of
that, "general" PPC code runs on these machines, but very slow.

ppu-gcc from the Barcelona Super Computing Center is a hacked gcc which
special optimizations for the Cell PPU and similiar processors (just to
clarify this: we are not talking about the SPE "vector units", just
about the main powerpc core). I know that it usually doesn't make much
sense to compile distributions optimized for a certain CPU, but in this
case, it makes a serious difference.

Some benchmark programs show a 10x speed increase when compiled with the
ppu-gcc, and i think even general purpose code would see a serious speed
boost.

Is it possible to create a flavour of debian-ppc64 which is optimized
for Cell? If nobody wants to do this, can somebody point me to the
"proper" way to recompile the entire debian distribution using a custom
compiler?

The main targets are gaming consoles at the moment, but they are by far
the cheapest PPC64 machines you can get today, and i'm very interested
in providing a good debian-based distribution for these systems.

regards,
Felix