On Thu, 2015-09-17 at 10:43 +0200, Marc Dietrich wrote: > Am Donnerstag, 17. September 2015, 15:28:47 schrieb Michael Ellerman: > > Discuss ... > > as long as Geoff still maintains the ps3 port - why?
Because even if Geoff maintains the ps3 port, there's still a non-zero cost to us for carrying the Cell code. To be clear there's more to Cell than just ps3. The platforms/cell code is mainly about supporting the IBM Cell Blades, as well as spufs, which is also used on ps3. See for example commit 74b5037baa20 ("powerpc/mm: Fix pte_pagesize_index() crash on 4K w/64K hash"): https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/powerpc/linux.git/commit/?id=74b5037baa2011a2799e2c43adde7d171b072f9e Which is a fix for crashes we were seeing on non-cell machines, caused by some obscure code that was added for Cell. It took several of us a few days to track that one down. But the main motivation would just be to drop code that no one's using. From December 2013 until April 2015 the Cell machines (not ps3) were broken in mainline and no one noticed. I now have automated boot tests to prevent that happening again, but it makes me think no one is using those machines much anymore. You also raise a good point, which is that ps3 is a separate platform, so we could actually keep that but get rid of platforms/cell. If we did that we'd need to move spufs out of platforms/cell though. Looking at the code size: platforms/ps3 6 KSLOC platforms/cell 11 KSLOC platforms/cell/spufs 7 KSLOC other cell code 2 KSLOC So dropping platforms/cell but not ps3 would save us ~6 KSLOC. Having said all that, this email was mainly a fishing expedition to see if anyone still cares about Cell support at all. It sounds like you at least are running mainline kernels on PS3? cheers _______________________________________________ Linuxppc-dev mailing list Linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org https://lists.ozlabs.org/listinfo/linuxppc-dev