RTEMS + PS3
Steven Johnson
sjohnson at sakuraindustries.com
Wed Aug 29 21:44:38 UTC 2007
The IBM Research Hypervisor is not the same interface as the Sony one.
They both utilise the System Call instruction to access functions of the
Hypervisor from the Supervisor space, but beyond that the similarity
ends. (at a programming level).
Targeting different Hypervisors may be useful, but at the moment I only
have access to the PS3 Hypervisor.
I am very much concerned by the dual hardware thread nature of the Cell
PowerPC core. It has 2 x 64 bit hardware threads operating (from a
software perspective it can be considered dual core). I have only seen
RTEMS running on Single Processor - Multi Threaded systems or (seen, but
not used) multi-processor systems where each processor runs a copy of
rtems and each processor intercommunicates using rtems facilities. What
are the issues when the Hardware threads are tightly coupled like the
Cell processor. I would want RTEMS to schedule 2 simultaneously running
threads to each processor thread. Are there any issues with that? has
it been done before? Are there any examples I can look at? How will
this effect things like critical regions when getting a critical region
will not guarantee that the other hardware thread is not going to access
the thing the critical region seeks to protect (The PowerPC targets I am
aware of implement critical regions by turning of IRQ's, which is only
"per thread" and not global.
Forget the SPU's, because I don't intend to run RTEMS on them, they will
just be intelligent programmable peripherals. Although it would be
feasible to port RTEMS to an SPU and implement a classic RTEMS
multi-processor implementation using them. The limited ram in each
(256K) may restrict the viability of that however.
Advice on the multi-threaded nature of this processor and best utilising
that on RTEMS would be very helpful.
Thanks,
Steven
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