Plan 9 and Inferno at the Google Summer of Code

Cell Memory Management

Several bugs have been identified and fixed in the MMU code. Although the first user process still dies prematurely. I hope that we're close to finding the remaining issues. The simulator output has been very useful, although it's really a tedious task having to single-step through long runs of instructions to find where things go wrong.

Most changes have been done in l.s, an assembly file containing processor initialization code & other essential functions, and mmu.c, which has the MMU code specific to the Cell BE. This is a brief summary of the issues that were solved so far:

Being working at a very early stage in the kernel, fixing all of these issues hasn't shown any perceivable improvement yet (other than the internal state of the processor being more like what we expect), simply because any little remaining issue is capable of screwing everything up!

By enabling Memory XLATE_FAULTS debug control in the simulator, I get a message saying “hw tlb loading disabled w/o sw loading available” right after switching to the user process. This is interesting because software management of TLB is enabled in the very beginning, long before the the user process is created, and I don't see that message during that. Anyway, at least I have a clue about where to look next!