Re: [PATCH 1/2] MAINTAINERS: Mark powerpc Cell as orphaned

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2024, at 14:33, Michael Ellerman wrote:
> Arnd is no longer actively maintaining Cell, mark it as orphan.
>
> Also drop the dead developerworks link.
>
> Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx>

The platform contains two separate bits, so we need to
decide what to do with each one of them in the long run:

CONFIG_PPC_IBM_CELL_BLADE is clearly dead, they were sold
from 2006 to 2012 and never that popular aside from a
handful of supercomputers that were all dismantled a
long time ago. Unless there is a user that wants to
keep maintaining these, we can probably remove all this
code soon, e.g. after the next LTS kernel.

CONFIG_SPU_FS is shared with the PS3 platform, which is
still used and maintained. The bit I don't know is how
common it is to actually still use spufs on the PS3.
Support for spu programs was removed in gcc-9.1 and
gdb-8.3, so none of the major distros even ship old
enough toolchains any more, but existing applications
and older toolchains should still work for people
that have them and want to run new kernels.

Geoff, are you using spufs on ps3, and if so, should
we move arch/powerpc/platforms/cell/spu* to the PS3
entry in the MAINTAINERS file? I don't think there
is any advantage in actually moving the files to
platforms/ps3 if we delete the cell blade support.

     Arnd