21.4.6 Cell Broadband Engine SPU architecture

When GDB is debugging the Cell Broadband Engine SPU architecture, it provides the following special commands:

info spu event

Display SPU event facility status. Shows current event mask and pending event status.

info spu signal

Display SPU signal notification facility status. Shows pending signal-control word and signal notification mode of both signal notification channels.

info spu mailbox

Display SPU mailbox facility status. Shows all pending entries, in order of processing, in each of the SPU Write Outbound, SPU Write Outbound Interrupt, and SPU Read Inbound mailboxes.

info spu dma

Display MFC DMA status. Shows all pending commands in the MFC DMA queue. For each entry, opcode, tag, class IDs, effective and local store addresses and transfer size are shown.

info spu proxydma

Display MFC Proxy-DMA status. Shows all pending commands in the MFC Proxy-DMA queue. For each entry, opcode, tag, class IDs, effective and local store addresses and transfer size are shown.

When GDB is debugging a combined PowerPC/SPU application on the Cell Broadband Engine, it provides in addition the following special commands:

set spu stop-on-load arg

Set whether to stop for new SPE threads. When set to on, GDB will give control to the user when a new SPE thread enters its main function. The default is off.

show spu stop-on-load

Show whether to stop for new SPE threads.

set spu auto-flush-cache arg

Set whether to automatically flush the software-managed cache. When set to on, GDB will automatically cause the SPE software-managed cache to be flushed whenever SPE execution stops. This provides a consistent view of PowerPC memory that is accessed via the cache. If an application does not use the software-managed cache, this option has no effect.

show spu auto-flush-cache

Show whether to automatically flush the software-managed cache.