Re: Exposing device ids and driver names

From: Nathaniel McCallum
Date: Thu Oct 01 2009 - 14:35:51 EST


On 10/01/2009 02:05 PM, Greg KH wrote:
On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 01:01:50PM -0400, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
On 10/01/2009 12:42 PM, Greg KH wrote:
Why not just use the baseline kernel as a model for this. Do a 'make
allmodconfig' and then extract the data and publish it that way. No
kernel changes are needed, and then any distro can be easily matched up
by this based on what they are using. That will save you time in
downloading zillions of distro releases, and provide a nice easy way to
show what the kernel.org releases support.

Unfortunately, I would not be able to track changes to the kernel in
this model. Since this is one of my explicit goals (to make sure that
distro kernel changes get upstream), I think a non-invasive kernel
modification would be worth the effort.

But this was an invasive modification, it added space to the kernel
images for no real benifit other than for your tracking tools. That's
not going to fly unless you can find another good use for the change.

Which is why I asked for advice for better options. I would prefer a non-invasive modification. I am hoping that someone more familiar with the layer would provide such a suggestion.

One potential benefit for moving module info to ELF sections would be the ability to strip kernel modules. As a test, I did this on a recent Fedora rawhide kernel I had lying around. Stripping the modules results in a 43% decrease in size (82M to 47M).

But I still would prefer a non-invasive solution.

Nathaniel
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