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List:       oprofile-list
Subject:    [Patch 0/3] Cell BE SPU: Add support for profiling Cell BE SPUs
From:       Maynard Johnson <maynardj () us ! ibm ! com>
Date:       2007-04-20 19:29:08
Message-ID: 46291484.1050503 () us ! ibm ! com
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Hello,
On March 28, I posted one big patch that added support for cycles-based 
profiling of the Synergistic Processing Unit (SPU) of the Cell Broadband 
Engine.  I fear the patch was probably too big for people to find time 
to look at, so I've broken that patch into a series of 3 smaller patches 
containing the following logical pieces:
   patch1: configure.in, opcontrol, oprofile.xml and a
	  small change to events/ppc64/cell-be/events
   patch2: changes to the daemon code
   patch3: changes to the post-processing code

Each successive patch is dependent on the previous patch, but when 
applied in order, each patch is compilable.

As stated earlier, this new support is dependent on kernel changes 
available from the Cell kernel maintainer at:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/arnd/patches/<version>
            where <version> must be "2.6.20-arnd2" or later.


The number of userspace changes was higher than usual because of the 
asymmetric architecture of the Cell Broadband Engine: i.e., there's a 
front-end PowerPC Processing Unit (PPU) and 8 Synergitstic Processing 
Units (SPUs), and these two types of processing units are completely 
different architecutres.

An SPU executable image can be loaded from either a separate file or 
from an embedded section in the PPU application or shared library.  If 
loaded from an embedded section, the post-processing tools need to know 
this so that the correct BFD function is used to create a bfd object 
from the embedded SPU ELF.  It is this requirement that drove the 
majority of the code changes in this series of patches.

Thanks in advance for any review comments.

Regards,
-Maynard


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