Re: [PATCH 0/2] powerpc: remove spufs coredump support

On Wed, Aug 26, 2026 at 08:47:42PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2026, at 18:06, Christian Brauner wrote:
> > Note that the IBM Cell blades that shipped the Cell processor were
> > removed in commit 05bf59fbeef3 ("powerpc/cell: Remove support for IBM
> > Cell Blades"). The PlayStation 3 is the only platform left and nothing
> > there produces or reads these notes.
> 
> I don't see how you concluded the PS3 does not produce these
> notes: as far as I can tell, spufs on PS3 should still be able to do
> this if a process using an SPU crashes, and old gdb binaries should
> still be able to read them.
> 
> Whether anyone is still developing SPU programs on new kernels and
> would benefit from the information in the dump I don't know.

Sure, _old_ debuggers can do that. But new debuggers can't and have
dropped any support for this 6 years as I pointed out in the cut off
part. Similarly, gcc killed the SPU target 6 years ago in 10.1. So no
modern toolchain can build this. And the last supported kernel I found
is v6.12.

I deliberately left spufs itself in but I would really like to get rid
of the coredump special-sauce we need to have for this.

> > So remove it.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner (Amutable) <[email protected]>
> 
> With clarifications in the changelog:

Ok, I'll point out that old tools can still do this.

> Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>

Thanks.