Re: [9fans] Plan9 on the Cell...

[Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>]

On 5/24/05, Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net> wrote:
> IBM looks like they are going to open up the Cell architecture:
> http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163106213
> Which, if someone can start shipping dev boards, would lead me to
> attempt a port :-)
> I've been lucky enough to be working on one of these puppies for a
> bit (demo at http://ps3.ign.com/articles/614/614705p1.html) and the
> thing is so sweet to squeeze performance out of that I'd love to be
> running a CPU server native on it...
> 

I have no direct knowledge of these things, but development boards are
going to be scarce for a while.  I've heard rumors that IBM will be
releasing the Cell full-systems simulator as part of them opening up
the architecture -- that will likely be your best candidate for a port
until development systems become more widely available.

In the meantime, porting to the G5 (or any other readily available
ppc64 platform) would probably be your best bet.  First step is the
compiler (while you may be able to use the 32-bit power compiler,
you'll really want 64-bit if you are looking to squeeze performance). 
Next is working with jmk (who is adding 64-bit support to the kernels
for opteron) to do the same thing for PowerPC.

That pretty much sums up the hard parts (at least for an initial
support).  How to deal with the SPE's is a really big question, but
that can be dealt with after the core port is complete.

As you can see, I haven't put much thought into this myself ;)

    -eric