On Fri, Dec 2, 2016 at 2:55 AM, Arnd Bergmann [off-list ref] wrote:

Yes, it's always been just the assembly symbols that broke, these were
the ones that Al's original patch changed and that ended up with
no version information.

Ok, and the reason is because even if we have a weak symbol from C, it
would always have a value.

Good to know what the heck the problem was.

I have managed to bisect the link failure to a specific binutils
commit by Alan Modra now:

Thanks. And I committed your "set to zero" patch, so we can hopefully
leave this all behind us.

I marked it for stable (not because older kernels need it, but because
it's the right thing to do and if we ever backport anything that
causes this we don't want to forget this).

And I'll keep the workaround in kernel/module.c just because it's
really late in the rc series, and I'd rather have both belt and
suspenders for this all right now.

               Linus