Development resources for Mono on PS3

Question

I have been considering taking the plunge and installing Linux on my Playstation 3. As C# is my current language of choice, the next logical step would be to install Mono.

I have done a little research and found that http://psubuntu.com/wiki/InstallationInstructions has instruction on installing Ubuntu and links to download an ISO containing a PS3 specific version of Ubuntu. There is also this cool project at http://code.google.com/p/celldotnet/ that has developed some code to utilize the 6 additional SPU cores of the CPU, not just the general-purpose one that you have access to by default.

The problem is that the project documentation seems a little thin. Has anyone set up a PS3 to develop .NET code? If so, what problems did you encounter? Does anyone have any code samples of how to even partially load up one of these monster processors?

Update:

I do realize that basic .NET/Mono programming will come into play here. The part I am fuzzy on is what sort of data structures do you pass to a specialty core? If I am reading this right, the 6 SPU cores have 128 registers at 128 bits each. I haven't seen any discussion on how to go about coding effectively for this.

Update 2:

IBM has announced that further development on the Cell processor has been cancelled. While this pretty much kills any desire I might have to develop on the platform, hopefully someone else might add some useful info.

Answer 1

Sorry I can't give you more useful info, but as far as mono goes, I think everything should work just the same as it does on a desktop pc. As long as mono is compiled for the ps3, that is.

Also, I've also noticed the lack of documentation on many of the google code projects. I wonder if there is a good way to go about fixing that

Answer 2

Just found this posting from Miguel de Icaza's blog. Promising that as recently as Feb 2008 he was looking into this. As he is a member of the SO community now, I hope he can shed some further light on the topic.

Answer 3

The PS3 features a PPC general purpose CPU.

You can try to cross compile mono to ppc and go from there.

Mono from svn has received a lot of attention regarding the ppc port, so I would advise using it instead of the 2.0 release.