IBM has a variety of Cell documentation available here.
http://www-01.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/products/Cell_Broadband_EngineThough some of the documentation is geared towards programming on linux, there is general programming documentation I would like to point out that's available here, http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247575.html Some more general hardware documentation here; http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-nl30-downloads/index.html And more specifically regarding developing Operating Systems on the Cell Broadband Engine here; http://www-01.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs/9F820A5FFA3ECE8C8725716A0062585F IBM has made quite an effort to let developers know that the information is available, if something isn't available we can always ask. I do not mind asking for this project if you feel something is missing from the documentation. Having discussed it previously, I think we need to get around the 32/64 bit barrier sooner or later anyway. As for Sony's hypervisor, if any documentation is needed for that, it shouldn't be hard to get that either. Most of the hardware itself has been documented if not in English, Japanese. On Sunday 16 March 2008 11:02:42 am William Kucharski wrote: > Ken Mays wrote: > > Ok. I was vouching for Shawn's idea of using the PS3 as it is a modern > > product that is being used for various project today. We can get modern > > PC desktops for about <=$299-399 so I don't think getting an modernly > > affordable PowerPC desktop/ workstation/ console should be that much more > > (if developers/engineers have to pay for it "out-of-pocket"). > > I think the central issue with the PS3, other than the fact that I don't > believe Sony fully documents the hardware, is the fact that it uses the > highly distributed Cell processor, which is likely to exacerbate the > problem that Solaris currently requires a CPU using a strongly ordered > memory model. > > PowerPC has always been weakly ordered, but the fact that most previous PPC > implementations were single CPU, single core systems has made it a bit > easier to ignore that. > > I suppose it might be possible to port Solaris to just run on the Cell PPE > without using any of the SPEs for now, but I have no idea if that would > even fly, given PPE-only performance is known to be rather poor. > > The fact that Cell is also a 64-bit ISA where all work to date has been > done for 32-bit PPC also doesn't help much. > > However, I refuse to be a naysayer here, and if the Community wants to run > with the PS3 idea I'm all for it, I'm just trying to make sure potential > roadblocks are known ahead of time. > > If specs were available for it I'd almost say that a Wii might make an > easier platform to port to, if you could actually find one in stores. :-) > > William Kucharski > _______________________________________________ > powerpc-discuss mailing list > powerpc-discuss at opensolaris.org -- Christopher Frost http://kodotai.com/roller/frostcs/
