A Man and his Penguin

While looking up the possibility of running Crysis on Wine, I came across a thread about Crysis on the PS3 using Linux and Wine.

I hope this is the definitive source for WHY it CANNOT be done.

1. People have been saying that you’d use this combination:
PS3 + Linux + Wine + Crysis. This will not work. The Playstation 3’s CPU is the Cell, which uses the PowerPC instruction set. Windows and all Windows programs, and therefore Wine, rely on the host CPU using the x86 instruction set. The two are not compatible. You cannot run x86-compiled programs on a PowerPC processor, and Crysis is an x86 program.

2. You would need an instruction emulator in order to run Wine. Since Linux is the host platform, you’re pretty much talking about Qemu as the instruction emulator. Qemu has "user-mode emulation+, so it’s possible to run x86-compiled programs on a PowerPC processor using this. But if we’re talking about PS3 + Linux + Qemu + Wine + Crysis, there’s another gotcha. Nobody in the world has managed to get Wine to run on Qemu via user-mode emulation.

3. So, we’d be stuck with emulating a full x86 machine running Windows XP. Now the combination is PS3 + Linux + Qemu + Windows XP + Crysis. Emulating from one instruction set to another is very costly in terms of performance. Crysis doesn’t run very well on normal PCs anyway - it won’t be playable when emulated on top of an entire other operating system.

4. The Playstation 3 has only 256 megabytes of RAM. Xubuntu Linux requires 128 megs, Qemu requires about 32 megabytes for itself, Windows XP requires 128 megs, Crysis requires a gigabyte. We’re out of RAM even before Windows XP has fully loaded.

5. Qemu cannot access the GPU to provide 3D acceleration to the guest OS. Crysis will not start without 3D acceleration.

6. Even if Qemu could provide 3D acceleration to a guest OS, Sony’s hypervisor does not allow Linux to access the GPU.

In short, it’s impossible. Not "possible but impractical". Not "theoretically possible but unplayable". Not "But wouldn’t the windows emulator convert the instructions to whatever the linux os needs". Not "You might be able to get the title screen up". Not "The frame rate would be measured in seconds per frame". Simply: No. Impossible.

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WARNING: Do not install the latest builds of Wine (0.9.48 and above). Right now there are too many regressions (things that previously worked, no longer work). Stick with whatever version you’ve got right now until things are in better shape. If you’ve got nothing to lose, though, file as many bug reports as possible or volunteer to be an application maintainer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 4:42 am and is filed under Other computers/OS'es. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.