Re: How could HP help Debian
On Mon, 2003-09-15 at 12:31, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 10:42:30AM -0400, Grzegorz B. Prokopski wrote:
> > My objective is to get SableVM working on HPPA.
> > I've just seen
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-hppa/2002/debian-hppa-200208/msg00132.html
> > which unfortunately ends w/o any conclusions (again).
> Kernel assist is the conclusion. You can't do multi-insn atomic
> operations in userspace because signals will get you in trouble.
Well, okay, I forgot about the idea of doing it in userspace if you
say so, but would you be able to point me to some discussion that
led to this conclusion? I looked at debian-hppa archives in previous
months but found nothing related (judging from topics).
However I talked with Etienne today (main SableVM author) and it should
be possible to make SableVM working using pthread locks with minimal
effort on the side of SableVM (and probably small performance loss).
So I'd like to know whether HPPA has sane implementation of pthread
locks? I saw those two messages:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-hppa/2003/debian-hppa-200303/msg00009.html
http://lists.arm.linux.org.uk/pipermail/linux-arm/2002-June/003710.html
First one updates pthread implementation for HPPA (which is promising
fact) but second, related to arm, says about performance problems of
pthread locks which could be solved by impelmenting cmp&swap which then
could be used by pthreads.
Well - as I said before - my main objective is to get SableVM working
for HPPA (which is not that bad goal in your eyes, I hope ;-) so if
I could go with pthread implementation for now - then OK.
In such case the LIBFFI implementation would be the key for it.
I am not an expert here, but from SableVM sources I may say that
it uses a lot of ffi_type_*, once ffi_prep_cif and some ffi_call.
If you think that there are any chances to make SableVM working with
your libffi for HPPA implementation - I would certainely would like to
get access to this code.
Cheers,
Grzegorz B. Prokopski
PS: Do you have any mechanism of CPU-affinity supported in your kernels?
--
Grzegorz B. Prokopski <gadek@debian.org>
Debian GNU/Linux http://www.debian.org
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