glenda blues
Sunday, 22. April 2007, 16:08:14
Eric Van Hensbergen, main developer of the 9p Linux kernel module, has been involved in porting Plan 9 to the Blue Gene/l architecture.
Initial attempts seemed to be quite successful: the kernel would boot, and the machine would sensibly reply to simple commands.
But then there was a funny turn - or should I rather say things went totally wild? It turned out that the apparently unexplainable crashers were not, as initially suspected, caused by some weird memory corruption -
When getting ethernet configured the two processors would start producing ddoouubbllee ccoonnssoollee oouuttppuutt, and then they would go back into sync! It is rare to read about such freaky stuff, totally and utterly broken, yet somehow functioning…
Latest reports however tell us that things got sorted out and it is now possible to cpu(1) into Blue Gene/l.
Progress seems to be fast…
Initial attempts seemed to be quite successful: the kernel would boot, and the machine would sensibly reply to simple commands.
But then there was a funny turn - or should I rather say things went totally wild? It turned out that the apparently unexplainable crashers were not, as initially suspected, caused by some weird memory corruption -
The cores were executing in such precise synchronization (in the same memory space no less) that they even were writing the same characters to the console buffers and incrementing the console pointer to the same value.
When getting ethernet configured the two processors would start producing ddoouubbllee ccoonnssoollee oouuttppuutt, and then they would go back into sync! It is rare to read about such freaky stuff, totally and utterly broken, yet somehow functioning…
Latest reports however tell us that things got sorted out and it is now possible to cpu(1) into Blue Gene/l.
Progress seems to be fast…
WIDGETIZE