by over9000 » Sun Aug 25, 2013 3:45 pm
I'm not sure why the original poster wants these, but they can certainly be of use even if there's no OS on the ecores.
The linux/gnu toolchain for the PS3 has separate elf formats for programs running on the PPU (main PowerPC cores) and SPUs ("synergistic processing units", analogous to the Epiphany cores). The main reasons for them on the PS3 are so that (a) each "architecture" has its own specific ELF format, thanks to differing instruction sets, memory layouts and so on, and (b) to allow dynamic loading of code onto the SPUs, with all the usual label/address fixup stuff handled automatically (which is basically *the* reason for ELF in the first place).
The PS3 toolchain also allows for SPU code/ELF files to be embedded into the host's ELF format so that entire SPU program images or chunks of it can be dynamically loaded onto the SPU with a few system calls. IIRC, using the ELF loader means that any labels that are shared between PPU and SPU will have the appropriate address translation done (so that the SPU sees the address in its local address space, as appropriate, whereas the PPU will see it at the global address. The CBE (Cell Broadband Engine) seems very like the Epiphany in a lot of ways, so I would have expected a similar sort of scheme here. I'm pretty surprised to see that this is not the case (yet?).
