From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 14:26:11 -0500 From: Eric Van Hensbergen To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan9 on the Cell... In-Reply-To: <36111140-8D4D-41B7-BCA2-17659EA08E26@telus.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline References: <36111140-8D4D-41B7-BCA2-17659EA08E26@telus.net> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 529de970-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 5/24/05, Paul Lalonde wrote: > IBM looks like they are going to open up the Cell architecture: > http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=3D16310621= 3 > 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... >=20 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).=20 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