arjan de lumens
Veteran
Reading the CELL documentation indicates that there is no way for the SPEs to hand interrupts to each other, nor is it possible for any of them to e.g. modify their page tables or supply any kind of local memory protection mechanism - the latter two are showstoppers if you wish to actually run a modern, self-contained OS within an SPE.scificube said:Personally I am trying to see if the claim that Cell could handle multiple OS simultaneously was pure marketing tripe or is there something the consensus here is missing. Without preemptive scheduling via the Kernel I would say most OS have considerable trouble running on an SPU. Without preemptive scheduling I would say one's OS is rather dated or really isn't a serious contender. It is an assumption perhaps wrong but I assume the SPUs were to have hand in this as the PPE alone running multiple OS seems impractical to me given it will also have to handle the wealth of more unpredicably branchy code out there.
I wish to know if the SPU can in fact fully operate indepently or not. OSs to me seem the only realm place true preemptive scheduling is needed so that's where I focus. I admit though...I'm inexperienced so perhaps that's wrong.
Multiple OSes on the CELL is no easier than multiple OSes on an x86; in practice, you would normally just run a single host OS and treat the SPEs as yet another resource that the OS arbitrates access to.