coredump: Document coredump code exclusively used by cell spufs
authorEric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Wed, 25 Nov 2020 21:51:32 +0000 (15:51 -0600)
committerEric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Thu, 10 Dec 2020 18:57:08 +0000 (12:57 -0600)
commitc39ab6de227306f331b47e7b6b51c2c7eaf0eeaf
treea39ebac210e1b80b51ab046abe0bf8f66577955d
parent125c00af3b2c498875b275c4ad932b4db2c6bae2
coredump: Document coredump code exclusively used by cell spufs

Oleg Nesterov recently asked[1] why is there an unshare_files in
do_coredump.  After digging through all of the callers of lookup_fd it
turns out that it is
arch/powerpc/platforms/cell/spufs/coredump.c:coredump_next_context
that needs the unshare_files in do_coredump.

Looking at the history[2] this code was also the only piece of coredump code
that required the unshare_files when the unshare_files was added.

Looking at that code it turns out that cell is also the only
architecture that implements elf_coredump_extra_notes_size and
elf_coredump_extra_notes_write.

I looked at the gdb repo[3] support for cell has been removed[4] in binutils
2.34.  Geoff Levand reports he is still getting questions on how to
run modern kernels on the PS3, from people using 3rd party firmware so
this code is not dead.  According to Wikipedia the last PS3 shipped in
Japan sometime in 2017.  So it will probably be a little while before
everyone's hardware dies.

Add some comments briefly documenting the coredump code that exists
only to support cell spufs to make it easier to understand the
coredump code.  Eventually the hardware will be dead, or their won't
be userspace tools, or the coredump code will be refactored and it
will be too difficult to update a dead architecture and these comments
make it easy to tell where to pull to remove cell spufs support.

[1] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20201123175052.GA20279@redhat.com
[2] 179e037fc137 ("do_coredump(): make sure that descriptor table isn't shared")
[3] git://sourceware.org/git/binutils-gdb.git
[4] abf516c6931a ("Remove Cell Broadband Engine debugging support").
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/87h7pdnlzv.fsf_-_@x220.int.ebiederm.org
Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
fs/binfmt_elf.c
fs/coredump.c