Apparatus and method for efficient communication of producer/consumer buffer status

Abstract

An apparatus and method for efficient communication of producer / consumer buffer status are provided. With the apparatus and method, devices in a data processing system notify each other of updates to head and tail pointers of a shared buffer region when the devices perform operations on the shared buffer region using signal notification channels of the devices. Thus, when a producer device that produces data to the shared buffer region writes data to the shared buffer region, an update to the head pointer is written to a signal notification channel of a consumer device. When a consumer device reads data from the shared buffer region, the consumer device writes a tail pointer update to a signal notification channel of the producer device. In addition, channels may operate in a blocking mode so that the corresponding device is kept in a low power state until an update is received over the channel.

Description

BACKGROUND [0001] 1. Technical Field [0002] The present application relates generally to an improved data processing system. More specifically, the present application is directed to an apparatus and method for efficient communication of producer / consumer buffer status. [0003] 2. Description of Related Art [0004] In a data processing system, one processor or device typically acts as a producer by placing data into a shared buffer while another processor or device acts as a consumer by reading and processing the data placed there by the producer. For example, consider a data processing system where a producer and a consumer, independently operating on processors or devices within the data processing system, have access to a shared data buffer region. The shared data buffer region may be located, for example, in shared system or I / O memory and is commonly accessible by both parties. In addition to the shared buffer region, two state variables are shared between the producer and consum...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0017] The channel interface is a message passing interface that overlaps input / output (I / O) with data processing and minimizes power consumed by synchronization. The channel facilities of the channel interface are accessed with three types of instructions: a read channel instruction, write channel instruction, and read channel count instruction which measures channel capacity. These channels may be configured as blocking or non-blocking channels. Channels that are defined as blocking channels cause the SPE to stall when accessing a channel whose channel count is zero. In this sense, the channel count indicates the number of outstanding operations that can be issued for that channel without causing the SPE to stall. Aside from blocking on channel access, an SPE program can monitor a variety of channel events using SPE interrupt facilities.

[0019] With the illustrative embodiments, the producer, running on an SPE, may read its signal notification channel(s) and operate in a blocking mode until the consumer updates the tail pointer information written to the signal notification channel(s). This provides a low-power, low-bandwidth alternative to monitoring, i.e. polling, a remote memory or register location that is local to the consumer. Further, this solution provides low latency responses for real-time systems since the SPE is automatically awoken as soon as data becomes available on the signal notification channel(s).

Problems solved by technology

As a result, this updating and monitoring requires additional resources, e.g., processor cycles, bus bandwidth, etc., within the system to support these operations.

Because of the need to utilized additional system resources, this solution may be considered too detrimental to overall system performance.

This may lead to serious degradation of performance for the producer, as the latency for reading remote locations can be several orders of magnitude worse than for main shared memory storage.

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