Main Inclusion Report for libspe2

Requirements

1. Availability: [http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/libs/libspe2]; available (intentionally) only for powerpc

2. Rationale:

   • Needed for support of PPU/SPU multiprocessing on PS3 and Cell platforms.

3. Security:

   • No CVE or Secunia history.
   • The user must be root or in the spu group. No privilege escalation is performed.
   • The library performs no network activity.

   • I (ColinWatson) have checked quickly over the source code for obvious badness. I see nothing especially scary, and its use is very constrained and hardware-specific.

4. Quality assurance:

   • The package appears to work out of the box and requires no configuration. It does not use debconf. The initscripts package already takes care of mounting the spufs virtual filesystem.
   • libspe2 was packaged specifically for Ubuntu and has no Debian maintainer.

   • [http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/cbe-oss-dev/ Upstream] appears to be vigorous and competent.

   • I do not know of an upstream bug tracker.

   • The package is used on PlayStation 3 systems and other systems containing the Cell Broadband Engine to interact with its processing elements. It is specific to the powerpc architecture.

5. Standards compliance:

   • The package complies with the FHS, Debian Policy, and library packaging standards as best as I can see (it installs a file into /usr/spu, but as I understand it that is a cross-compilation standard).

   • The one oddity I see is that it ought to use binfmt-support instead of custom registration code. I will convert it when I have time.

   • It uses standard debhelper packaging and a quilt patch system.

6. Dependencies:

   • None outside main.

7. Background information:

   • http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/pa-libspe2/ and similar Cell-specific documents may help explain what libspe2 does.

Reviewers

ColinWatson.

MartinPitt: approved