>>848959
A few years ago I installed the generic FreeBSD 9 PPC64 distribution on the PS3 via disc and used OtherOS++ to boot it, I later had it compile FreeBSD 10 on the system itself to do an upgrade from source. Everything I used on it was installed via ports which meant compiling it on the system as well. Outside of the heat, it worked fine, you just need to give it a lot of swap space because the PS3 has very little RAM. In all honesty it would be much better to setup a cross-compiling pkg repo and just use that, there's no point in doing it on the system itself, I was just curious if it could.
I don't remember if any of the public petitboot images supported scanning UFS by default, I remember compiling it myself so that I could have it automatically boot into FreeBSD on poweron.
The whole chain of loading was like this.
In REBUG, set guestos to be the primary OS.
poweron > PS3 bootloader > petitboot > FreeBSD
While current CFWs support executing OOS++ they don't easily facilitate creating an OOS++ partition, I documented the somewhat convoluted process but never revised it, if anyone wants it I can provide it with the required files.
>I'm wondering how a regular user could take advantage of the hardware with consumer software and programs not designed for the ps3 (but only for PPC)
There were a handful of open source drivers and libraries made for utilizing aspects of the hardware but I don't think they're hosted anywhere anymore, here's a mirror I took of one of the popular source repos before it was shut down.
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/zDMZof1kvaW99KaZwDGzTrSMrGV38JULjMa7ATyDWMw9DLaEiHdV/ps3dev
You'd have to revise programs to take advantage of them if you wanted to utilize PS3 specific hardware. Any existing PPC optimizations should work without change though, like if someone did inline assembly for PPC64 or if the compiler has optimization techniques that work well on PPC for specific portions of the source. It's really only the GPU portions of the PS3 that need special attention but even those you can just use patches to existing libraries like OpenGL and take advantage of it.