From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 18:26:41 -0500 From: Eric Van Hensbergen To: Paul Lalonde Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan9 on the Cell... In-Reply-To: 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> Cc: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 52e6be02-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 5/24/05, Paul Lalonde 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. =20 > > 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. =20 > 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. >=20 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