Building an application

Three versions of the ALF for Hybrid-x86 libraries are provided with the SDK:

• Optimized: This library has minimal error checking on the SPEs and is intended for production use.
• Error-check enabled: This version has a lot more error checking on the SPEs and intended to be used for application development.
• Traced: These are the optimized libraries with performance and debug trace hooks in them. These are intended for debugging functional and performance problems associated with ALF. Refer to Performance and debug trace for more information about performance and debug options for ALF.

An ALF for Hybrid-x86 application must be built as two separate binaries as follows:

• The first binary is for the ALF host application, and you need to do the following:
  1. Compile the x86_64 host application with the D_ALF_PLATFORM_HYBRID define variable, and specify the /opt/cell/sdk/prototype/usr/include include directory.
  2. Link the x86_64 host application with the ALF x86_64 host runtime library, alf_hybrid, found in the /opt/cell/sdk/prototype/usr/lib64 directory and the DaCS x86_64 host runtime library, dacs_hybrid, also found in the /opt/cell/sdk/prototype/usr/lib64 directory.
• The second binary is for the ALF SPE accelerator computational kernel, and you need to do the following:
  1. Compile the application's SPE code with the D_ALF_PLATFORM_HYBRID define variable, and specify the /opt/cell/sysroot/usr/spu/include and the /opt/cell/sysroot/opt/cell/sdk/prototype/usr/spu/include include directories.
  2. Link the application's SPE code with the ALF SPE accelerator runtime library, alf_hybrid, found in the /opt/cell/sysroot/opt/cell/sdk/prototype/usr/spu/lib directory.
  3. Use the ppu-embedspu utility to embed the SPU binary into a PPE ELF image. The resulting PPE ELF object needs to be linked as a PPE shared library.

For references, Makefiles are provided for all of the samples in the package:

alf-hybrid-examples-source-3.0.0-*.noarch.rpm