Building an application

Three versions of the ALF for Cell BE 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 Cell BE 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 PPE host application. ALF host include files are located in /usr/include and /usr/include/arch/cell directory.
  2. Link the PPE host application with the ALF PPE host runtime library, libalf, found in /usr/lib directory, the libspe runtime library, libspe2, and the dynamic linking library libdl.
• 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. The ALF accelerator header files are located in /usr/spu/include.
  2. Link the application's SPE code with the ALF SPE accelerator static runtime library, libalf, found in /usr/spu/lib.
  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-examples-source-3.0.0-*.noarch.rpm