The following are the known limitations for the ALF for Hybrid-x86 implementation:
- The current implementation does not support the registration of an error
handler. A call to the API function alf_error_handler_register results in a no-op. ALF does not provide a default error handler.
The runtime exits when it encounters an error.
- Multiple invocations of alf_init() within
the same program are not supported. A second call to alf_init() results
in an error.
- Accelerator partitioning only works if there is a data set associated
with the specified task.
- The ALF for Hybrid-x86 implementation currently does not support data
coherency across multiple Cell BE BladeCenters. Using a data set with one
Hybrid x-86 host and multiple Cell BE BladeCenters leads to data corruption.
However, host data partitioning without data sets works across multiple Cell
BE BladeCenters.
- The ALF API supports the concept of heterogeneous accelerators; however,
in this hybrid implementation of ALF, only the SPE is supported as an accelerator.
The accel_type parameter in the API function alf_task_desc_create is
ignored.
- If strict checking is enabled (by providing a definition for _ALF_CFG_CHECK_STRICT_),
all the buffer sizes provided through alf_task_desc_set_int32 need
to be multiples of 16 bytes, otherwise the SPE returns a fatal error.