Re: [PATCH] x86/kbuild: enable modversions for symbols exported from asm

From: Don Zickus
Date: Fri Dec 09 2016 - 11:17:10 EST


On Fri, Dec 09, 2016 at 01:50:41PM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> >
> > We have plenty of customers with 10 year old drivers, where the expertise
> > has long left the company. The engineers still around, recompile and make
> > tweaks to get things working on the latest RHEL. Verify it passes testing
> > and release it. Then they hope to not touch it again for a few years until
> > the next RHEL comes along.
> >
> > Scary, huh? :-)
>
> Oh yeah my aim here is not to make distro or out of tree module vendors
> life harder, actually the opposite. If it turns out modversions really is
> the best approach, I'm not in a position to complain about its complexity
> because we have Suse and Redhat people maintaining the build and module
> systems :) I just want to see if we can do things better.

Hi Nick,

I think we are in pretty good agreement here. We can do better than
modversions. On the flip side, I would hate to see modversions ripped out
until we have an alternate path forward as it does get us by for now. :-)

Cheers,
Don