[Cbe-oss-dev] spu_create.2 man page

[Luke Browning]

On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 09:13 +1100, Jeremy Kerr wrote:
> Michael,
> 
> > Could you explain to me in a sentence or three what a "gang" is?  I
> > might add a few further words to the page about this term.
> 
> A gang is a set of contexts that should be considered as one unit to the 
> scheduler - they should be scheduled in and out as one entity (ie, all 
> are scheduled, or none are).
> 

I would be a little more vague as we haven't implemented gang scheduling
yet... A safer definition might be a group of spu contexts that are
functionally related to each other and which share a common scheduling
parameters - priority and policy.  In the future, gang scheduling may be
added causing the group to be switched in and out as a single unit.  

> > Does that mean:
> >
> >    "Isolated contexts are prevented from performing from
> >     some PPE operations,"
> > ?
> 
> Nope, isolated contexts are protected from the rest of the system - for 
> example, the SPE's local memory cannot be accessed by anything outside 
> the SPE. There is no restriction on what the SPE can do.
> 
> > Also, what does PPE stand for?  Is it worth mentioning this in the
> > page?
> 
> PPE = PowerPC Processing Element, the general-purpose processor present 
> on the Cell/B.E. architecture.
> 
> I think that anyone who's reading the spufs manpages will already be 
> familiar with the terms PPE and SPE, but it can't hurt to clarify 
> these, right? :)
> 
> > Naive typographical question: should "npc register" be "NPC
> > register"?
> 
> Yep. The names of the files are all lower-case, but the register is 
> called the NPC.
> 
> > The page contains the text:
> >
> >     "Using this flag requires that the other SPU context
> >      be passed in the"
> >
> > Should this be:
> >
> >     "Using this flag requires that a file descriptor referring to
> >      the other SPU context be passed in the"
> 
> Yep!
> 
> Thanks for the review,
> 
> 
> Jeremy
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