[Vm-dev] [Q] I wish know status of Vm for multicore processors.

Edgar J. De Cleene edgardec2005 at gmail.com
Mon Mar 9 21:27:57 UTC 2015


Very thanks.



On 3/9/15, 4:57 PM, "Douglas McPherson" <djm1329 at san.rr.com> wrote:

>  
> 
> Hi Edgar,
> 
> I can add a little bit to what Clément has written.
> 
> The Parallella has a dual-core ARMv7 Cortex-A9. The ARMv6 or ARMv7 cog-stack
> VMs run just fine on the Parallella's ARMs, including FFI. But these are just
> the single-core VMs, I have no experience with the RoarVM.
> 
> You can download a recent VM from Eliot¹s site to run on the Parallella ARM.
> Recently I have been building only the ARMv6 stack VMs. This will run fine on
> the Parallella even though the Parallella is an ARMv7. I haven¹t generated the
> v7 VMs for a while because I¹m still trying (without much progress) to track
> down a problem with FAST_BITBLT enhancements when compiled for v7. However,
> the v7 VM, when compiled without FST_BITBLT support, seems to work fine. I can
> build this for you and upload to Eliot¹s site if you are interested. I believe
> it is a little faster than the v6 VM when run on the v7.
> 
> The Parallella also has the Epiphany co-processor, which on the basic model
> has a 4x4 grid of custom RISC cores. These cores are likely too
> memory-constrained to run full Cog VMs. One approach to using the Epiphany
> cores is via OpenCL via FFI. There is a quite nice Squeak OpenCL package on
> squeaksource. I have used it to run several Epiphany-accelerated functions,
> i.e. matrix multiplication etc. In these experiments, Squeak runs on the ARM
> and coordinates the execution of the Epiphany cores. I would be happy to share
> what I¹ve done, but most of the work is already present in the OpenCL package.
> 
> HTH,
> Doug
> 
> 
> 
>> On Mar 5, 2015, at 01:41, Clément Bera <bera.clement at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Can you be more precise ? Do you want a research VM or a production ready VM
>> ? Does your question mean: is there a VM working on such hardware or is there
>> a VM working and making use of all the cores on such hardware ?
>> 
>> Let's say you want a VM using all the Cores of your hardware:
>> 
>> If you want a research-like VM, you can look into the Roar VM
>> <https://github.com/smarr/RoarVM> . It's a VM for computer with lots of
>> cores, it will make efficient use of all the cores. It's running Squeak and
>> Pharo.
>> 
>> If you want a production ready VM, the general strategy applied now is to
>> have several images running in parallel communicating through sockets.
>> There's work being done in making the FFI multithreaded so that things such
>> as database access use several threads.
>> 
>> Now let's say you just want a VM running on such hardware, which is (I think)
>> ARMv9:
>> 
>> There's both ARMv6 and ARMv7 VM working. They should work on ARMv9 too but
>> most probably not everything will work out if the box (you may need to fix
>> some details such as FFI).
>> 
>> Clement
>> 
>> 2015-03-05 9:58 GMT+01:00 Edgar J. De Cleene <edgardec2005 at gmail.com>:
>>>  
>>> So we said we have a Paralella board or any multicore computer.
>>> Have any working VM for this?
>>> 
>>> Edgar 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 




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