Unnecessary zero initializers (was Re: [PATCH 2.3.48] initrd fix (Mike Galbraith))

From: Bradley D. LaRonde (brad@ltc.com)
Date: Sun Feb 27 2000 - 20:07:41 EST


----- Original Message -----
From: "Russell King" <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>
To: "Alan Cox" <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: "Frank Bernard" <fb@fbit.de>; <torvalds@transmeta.com>; "Linux Kernel"
<linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu>
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2000 12:09 PM
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2.3.48] initrd fix (Mike Galbraith)

> Alan Cox writes:
> > > Is there any reason (apart from making vmlinux and kernel binary
images larger)
> > > for explicitly initialising variables with 0 when they will be placed
in the
> > > BSS anyway?
> >
> > Long long ago (before 1.0) the kernel didnt zero the BSS. Some legacy of
> > that survives in old assignments - otherwise none
>
> Oh, I remember those kernels ;)
>
> However, I noticed that the patch was introducing some extra explicit zero
> initialisations.

There are some big ones in drivers/block/ll_rw_blk.c. I submitted a patch a
while back to get them removed, but it looks like they are still there in
2.3.48.

They seem like just a careless waste of space to me, especially for certain
embedded applications where the kernel (uncompressed) executes in-place
(XIP) from ROM.

Regards,
Brad

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