The Cell Processor Programming Model

A paper will be presented by Arnd Bergmann in 22-25 June at LinuxTag 2005

"Porting Linux to run on Cells PowerPC core is a relatively easy task because of the similarities to existing platforms like IBM pSeries or Apple Power Macintosh, but does not give access to the enormous computing power of the SPUs.

Only the kernel is able to directly communicate with an SPU and therefore needs to abstract the hardware interface into system calls or device drivers. The most important functions of the user interface including loading a program binary into an SPU, transferring memory between an SPU program and a Linux user space application and synchronizing the execution. Other challenges are the integration of SPU program execution into existing tools like gdb or oprofile.

A model has been proposed to provide an interface that attempts to integrate well into the existing set of Linux system calls and enable software authors to easily integrate the use of SPUs into their own libraries and applications."

There is more info about author (He works for Ibm on porting Linux on The Cell )

http://www.linuxtag.org/typo3site/freecongress-details.html?&L=1&talkid=156

.::linux+debian+cell::.