Where's the PS3 hypervisor?

I am not convinced that it is even theoretically possible to implement affinity, at least to the levels described in some of the research papers from the IBM side.

Imagine, if you will, that I want to have three adjacent SPEs running a pipeline between XDR and BIO, and I don't want traffic from XDR to them, or from them to BIO, to compete with the CPU's access to EIB. So, using the 0-3 top, 4-7 bottom labeling, I need three of the 4-7 SPEs.

That may not be possible if the reserved SPE and the defective/disabled one are both on that side of the chip.

So there's cases you can describe where a given layout would be advantageous, but would be possible on some PS3 systems and not others. So you have to go without.

I don't know how much of a difference affinity makes in the real world; the IBM research papers I saw suggested it was noticable but not huge.

 

Hmm, you have a good point. If they committed to a consistent pattern, then you could at least guarantee... hmm.

Yes. If the reserved-SPE is designed with the goal of leaving some affinity options open, you can always ensure that there is at least one pair on each "side" of the Cell (one pair between MIC and BIO, one between PPE and BIO) that could be used with affinity. The Cell SDK under Linux can't do affinity, but there's no reason that games in theory couldn't do it, if Sony supported it.

I think it's true that maxing out EIB is fairly unlikely, although it seems that the available bandwidth among the available SPEs, PPE, and so on, is enough that you could probably get into the range where you start seeing performance hiccups. After all, the 300GB/s bandwidth is theoretical; that doesn't mean that, if you're using 200GB/s, you can simply do another 100GB however you want.

So, in practice, it sounds like for most games, the practical loss is just "two SPEs", and it's only on the still-theoretical end that the EIB bandwidth questions could come up. It'll be interesting to see what devs are saying about it in about three years.

 

Okay. I think I may see the issue.

Back in 2005, when I was doing a cram course in "what's a Cell and who cares" to do writing at IBM, they told us that the hypervisor usually ran on the PPE, but that the hardware was designed to allow it to hand privilege off to an SPE, and thereafter have the hypervisor on the SPE.

It sounds like you're saying that's just plain false, and in fact, people have mistaken the secure processing vault feature for a hypervisor.

Or, at the very least, that on the PS3, the hypervisor actually runs on the PPE, and the reserved SPE, while under its control, isn't actually running in hypervisor mode.

So, IBM has published statements like "The SPEs can even be used to support hypervisor functionality.", and I think everyone's just assumed that they meant that the PPE could hand-off the hypervisor magic bits to an SPE. It sounds like, from what you're saying, what it actually means is that an SPE, once walled off, can provide support services to a hypervisor.

It sounds as though SPEs have no privelege model internally, but:

Devices can utilize the signal notification feature of Cell to quickly and efficiently inform the SPE code of the completion of commands. More often than not, SPEs utilized in this model will run in privileged mode.​

This kind of thing sure makes it sound like at least one of the two privilege modes can be applied to an SPE, giving it access to privileged chunks of main memory.

So I guess we have two separate questions here. One is, if you had a completely unfettered Cell, and you could write any code you wanted on it, could you write code that resulted in one of the SPEs having access to all the privilege one registers and memory maps, and no running PPE code with access to them?

The other would be what the PS3 is doing, which seems to be that the privilege 1 mode code still exists on the PPE, and has carefully partitioned off one SPE to serve as sort of an unholy legion of the night or something.

I want to be sure I get this right, because I have an article on PS3 Linux going through editing, and if every other article on the topic has been wrong, getting it right will be worth the effort.

 

Well, my original information came from IBM -- but mostly on the compilers side, so they may have just been confused. I'll poke around more.