TP4Cell - GDB Tracepoint for Cell

This is the homepage of tp4cell, but you can access the detail page provided by sf.net via tp4cell

Introduction

TP4Cell is a port of the GDB Tracepoints extension for the IBM Cell B.E. Architecture. GDB tracepoints is a facility that allows to collect data comparable to a breakpoint but without stopping the application for interactive retrival of data. Tracepoints has been specified in GDB User Manual, but no public implementation has been made available to date. Our work is mainly based on the research of DSLab about this issue. You can get more information about the gdb tracepoints implementation of DSLab from this link. http://dslab.lzu.edu.cn/members/hofrat/tp.html

So, tp4cell will help the CELL developers who using GDB to debug programs which need the GDB tracepoints extension. And this project will be as a participated project to IBM Cell BE Contest 2007.

The IBM Cell B.E. Architecture is a multi-core system architecture which with a PowerPC processor element and 8 synergistic processor elements.

more info. about GDB and Cell

Authors

NameE-mailHomepage
Wu Zhangjinzhangjinw[at]gmail.comhttp://dslab.lzu.edu.cn/members/falcon/
Su Pengsup03[at]lzu.cn
Bai Shuweibaishw06[at]lzu.cnhttp://dslab.lzu.edu.cn/members/baishw/
Liang Linghuilianglh03[at]lzu.cn

Status

The first version of tp4cell have released, this version is implemented with SDK2.1 under YDL/PS3. it include two part, one for ppu-gdb, one for spu-gdb.

Download

releases

the latest version can debug all of the basic PPU, SPU, Combined CELL BE programs. please see detail demos as following.

Usage

test programs
test demos

we have debugged three basic types of programs running on CELL with tp4cell, above are the basic programs, and the detail debugging demos.
more documents about tracepoint and tp4cell

Links & References

  • GDB - The GNU Debugger
  • GDB Tracepoints (DSLab implementation)
  • Cell resource center on DeveloperWorks, IBM
  • Cell on alphaworks.ibm.com
  • Cell Developer Corner on Power.org
  • Programming on the Cell B.E. processor(PS3)

    • Acknowledgment

    Thank DSLab of Lanzhou University, China for giving us with a very good experiment environment. and IBM Corporation for providing us with such a precious opportunity to show our creativity and development capabilities, and the chance to communicate with other universities.

    Individually, thank Dr. Zhou Qingguo, Prof. Nicholas Mc Guire, Mr. Wang Baojun from DSLab, and Dr. Ulrich Weigand, Mr. Ge ning from IBM, at last thank every member of our team for their hard work and effort.

    Contact

    Contact us: zhouqg [at] lzu.edu.cn