jhhur@sorak.kaist.ac.kr (Jin Ho Hur) (03/18/88)
Our group are now evaluating Transputer and 80386 for our project of building
a multiprocessor system for our project. There, one question
arised and I found no answer from the Transputer architecture reference manual
(RM) and the compiler writer's guide (CWG).
Is there anybody out there who can answer to our questions?
Our requirements:
Basic unit of computation in our system is object which is
comprised of an address space and a set of execution thread.
We need the object to be dynnmically loadable and the execution
threads (concurrent processes in T4/T8) to be created over those
objects. In that regard, we appreciate the capability of Transputer
to create a process very cheaply. But w.r.t. the program image
loading, we want to that in run time, not just in reset or analyse
time as is specified in RM.
Our interpretation of Tranputer:
There are two way to load program images on Transputer from our
understanding of the RM and CWG:
(1) Upon reset or analyse, the transputer is ready to accept the
program image over any links. Based on the first byte, it loads
the program on MemStart and jumps to it.
(2) Upon analyse, one can peek/poke the memory of Transputer.
Questions:
(1) Should the program image be loaded a priori for a process on
the image to be created?
(2) Related to (1) above, is there any way to load a part of the
program image upon demand? For it to be possible, there should be
a mechamism to raise a trap upon invalid code address (a ka page
fault) so that any pre-defined program be invoked to load the
wanted part of the image. RM or CWG mentions nothing about that.
(3) Or, is there a room for a MMU circuitary to be attached to the
external memory interface of Transputer?
(4) Is there any way to load the program image while the transputer
is running? We may imaging the following scenario like we allocate
a persistent process be running over each channel, define a protocol
for it to recognize a program image loading phase, let it poke the
remaining message to the specified location in the message, and
create a process over the image. Is it the only way we can
imagine?
Please reply via mail. I will summarize the responses.
JinHo Hur
Dept of Computer Science, KAIST, Seoul, Korea
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