On Monday 31 December 2007 16:55:57 Torsten Kaiser wrote: > On Dec 31, 2007 3:42 PM, Adrian Bunk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > With CONFIG_MODULES=y the 13 EXPORT_SYMBOL's that only exist for the > > theoretical possibility of CONIG_UNIX=m waste a few hundred bytes > > of memory. > > One thing I always wondered about in this discussion about wasted > EXPORT_SYMBOL's: > Shouldn't it be possible to garbage collect these? > > depmod already contains code to analyze all modules to create a > dependency tree. It should not be too difficult to extend it to create > a list of all symbols that really are used by the current modules. > Everything else could be stripped to save space. > > The problem with that: > * out-of-tree modules would break if they don't get lucky to only use > the remaining symbol. I would not see this as a problem, if the help > text of the garbage-collect-option would contain a note like "don't > enable this if you want out-of-tree modules". > * if you later change your .config to include additional modules you > might need to rebuild vmlinux and reboot into the new kernel. > Currently you can probably build and load new modules without a > reboot. (for example: usb drivers)
I'd say the practical advantage to the user would be almost zero. Which distribution is going to enable this option and defacto banning external modules? -- Greetings Michael. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
