Aidan Delaney’s weblog

IBM have Cell development tools…ummm…..obviously. Their tools are GCC And Jochen at IBM has been quite keen to push packaged versions of these tools into Fedora. I have a need for them on Fedora 9 (on PS3). Interested parties can follow the development here. I’ve got every confidence that their GCC package will follow soon.

This is great stuff for a few reasons. One; being totally self-centred, I need a spu-gcc package. I have my own internal one but it’d be nicer to have stuff upstream. Two; IBM previously offered their Cell SDK on RedHat Enterprise Linux. This shows that they are quite happy to engage with the wider community. I know they’ve engaged in lots of different areas but there is a qualitative difference between supporting Linux by providing a download and actively working with the community.

It’s quite novel to be talking to IBM (actually Jochen specifically) and for them to take on board my requirements and use them to inform internal development. It would be hard to buy that level of support from most companies and, at the moment, I’m getting it for free from Big Blue.

Maybe they didn’t Maybe they’re just doing what they were going to do anyway. But at least it’s “The Right Thing ™” and I’m astroturfing them.

The spu-binutils package is available now.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 1:43 pm and is filed under General, Teaching. 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.