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

[Michael Kerrisk]

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for following up.

> > 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).

Okay -- I added a sentence like that to the page.

> > 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.

Okay.

> > 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? :)

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.

Okay -- changed.

> > 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!

Okay -- fixed.

> Thanks for the review,

Your welcome.  Thanks for the updates!

The updated pages will be in man-pages-2.69.

Cheers,

Michael