Hi Paul,

On 3/5/2015 12:36 AM, Paul Bolle wrote:

On Thu, 2015-03-05 at 09:11 +0100, Paul Bolle wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 2015-03-04 at 16:35 -0800, Ray Jui wrote:

quoted

+MODULE_AUTHOR("Ray Jui [off-list ref]");
+MODULE_DESCRIPTION("Broadcom Cygnus GPIO Driver");
+MODULE_LICENSE("GPL v2");

These three macros will be preprocessed away. (There's also
MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE. I don't yet know how that is handled in a
non-modular build, sorry.)

It turns out MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE is _really_ preprocessed away. See
include/linux/module.h:
    #ifdef MODULE
    /* Creates an alias so file2alias.c can find device table. */
    #define MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE(type, name)                                 \
    extern const typeof(name) __mod_##type##__##name##_device_table         \
      __attribute__ ((unused, alias(__stringify(name))))
    #else  /* !MODULE */
    #define MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE(type, name)
    #endif


Did I get that right?

(I knew the other three MODULE_* macros are handled in slightly more
complicated way, but the effect is basically that they are preprocessed
away.)


Paul Bolle

Even these module macros will be pre-processed away when the driver is
statically linked (and yes, I'm not planning to ever make these driver
built as module), I'm not too sure about the convention here. I thought
that they are still good to be in the driver for information purpose.
I'm seeing other pinctrl drivers doing this as well.

Maybe Linus can help to clarify this?

Thanks,

Ray