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

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

On 5/24/05, Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net> wrote:
> Yes, I've been reading the compiler code in anticipation.  It's been
> close to 15 years since I last did any real compiler (code
> generation) work; it will take me some effort to get back up to speed.
> I've been itching for an excuse to get a power mac, and this might be
> it.
>

I've offered access to my G5 to forsyth for some time now (of course,
I haven't gotten around to setting it up ;)  Now that I have 9grid.us
up, I'll turn to getting my G5 up-to-date and available for folks who
want to take a crack at a ppc64 compiler.
 
>
> Is the 32 bit power compiler heavilly used by anyone?
>

Not that I know of, but it was working fairly well for Motorolla
32-bit PowerPC chips, so it should be acceptable for IBM ppc32 - at
least as a starting point.
 
> The SPEs, of course, are the interesting part from the systems point
> of view.  It would be interesting to find a clean way of offering
> them up (along with the required PU code - that's the hard part) as a
> cpu-like computing resource.  The tricky part is that SPE code seems
> to like to set up pipelines using multiple SPEs, which makes
> allocation trickier.  Pre-emption looks expensive because of the
> local memories.
> 

Yes, there are many interesting issues.  It would be great if Brucee
could comment on the "Froggie" architecture (which was more of an
Inferno port, but regardless).  There are some rudimentary
similarities, at least from a high-level organizational view, and his
approach to handling the various "legs" under Inferno might be a
starting point for how to manage SPEs under Plan 9.

         -eric