On Wed, Feb 26, 2025 at 10:49:36AM +0000, Athanasios Anastasiou wrote: > Hi > > I have noticed the same about the Wii and agree that it would be great to > have Debian on it. But I can also see the point o > > If we are talking about taking advantage of SMP (?), the kernel is supposed > to do this automatically by balancing computations across all CPUs. > Therefore, presumably, only the kernel would have to be compiled with any > additional effort. > Except if I am missing something here, is the Wii's CPU instruction set > deviating from the Powerpc standard in some particular way that it would > require recompiling a whole program? > > Just out of curiosity, which instruction are you referring to in "...scan > the existing binaries looking for the instruction..."? > > All the best
Unfortunately it appears a mistake in the CPU means the instructions used on powerpc for atomic locking don't work on the Wii due to it not automatically synching caches between cores. This means you can't fix it in the kernel. You literally need to make every piece of code using those instructions insert a cache sync instruction before the atomic operation. I guess Nintendo dealt with that in the compiler in the SDK for the Wii U, so it wasn't really an issue there. As a general purpose powerpc CPU, this thing could never have been shipped in that state. But it wasn't a general purpose powerpc CPU. -- Len Sorensen
