Re: [PATCH 00/10] drivers/pci: avoid module_init in non-modular host/pci*

[Michal Simek]

On 14.12.2015 09:24, Thierry Reding wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 09:19:30AM +0100, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
>> Hi Paul,
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 2:41 AM, Paul Gortmaker
>> <paul.gortmaker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> This series of commits is a slice of a larger project to ensure
>>> people don't have dead code for module removal in non-modular
>>> drivers.  Overall there was roughly 5k lines of dead code in the
>>> kernel due to this.  So far we've fixed several areas, like tty,
>>> x86, net, etc. and we continue to work on other areas.
>>>
>>> There are several reasons to not use module_init for code that can
>>> never be built as a module, but the big ones are:
>>>
>>>  (1) it is easy to accidentally code up unused module_exit and remove code
>>>  (2) it can be misleading when reading the source, thinking it can be
>>>       modular when the Makefile and/or Kconfig prohibit it
>>>  (3) it requires the include of the module.h header file which in turn
>>>      includes nearly everything else.
>>>
>>> Here we convert some module_init() calls into device_initcall() and delete
>>> any module_exit and remove code that gets orphaned in the process, for
>>> an overall net code reduction, which is always welcome.
>>>
>>> The use of device_initcall ensures that the init function ordering
>>> remains unchanged, but one could argue that PCI host code might be more
>>> appropriate to be handled under subsys_initcall.  Fortunately we can
>>> revisit making this extra change at a later date if desired; it does
>>> not need to happen now, and we reduce the risk of introducing
>>> regressions at this point in time by separating the two changes.
>>>
>>> Over half of the drivers changed here already explicitly disallowed any
>>> unbind operations.  For the rest we make them the same, since there is
>>> not really any sensible use case to unbind any built-in bus support that
>>> I can think of.
>>
>> Personally, I think all of these should become tristate, so distro kernels
>> don't have to build in PCI(e) support for all SoCs. multi_v7_defconfig kernels
>> are becoming too big.
>>
>> That does not preclude making these modules un-unloadable, though.
> 
> Most of these can't be made tristate as-is, because they use symbols
> that aren't exported. Many of those symbols can easily be exported, so
> its just a matter of getting the respective patches merged. I disagree
> with making the modules non-unloadable, though. I have a local branch
> with changes necessary to unload the host controller driver and it
> works just fine.

Great.

Send them out.

Thanks,
Michal

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