On Tue, Mar 31, 2026 at 12:45:59PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

On Tue, Mar 31, 2026, at 10:55, Andy Shevchenko wrote:

quoted

On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 11:52:34PM -0700, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:

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On March 30, 2026 11:25:33 PM PDT, Andy Shevchenko [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 02:46:45PM -0700, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:

The code section will be discarded when the kernel finishes booting so it
only increases image size on disk. 

Almost true. Interesting microblaze case, where it's not discarded.
But I can't find where it's actually used on any architecture.

I'm pretty sure that is just mistake

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A bit of archaeology:

The first time it appeared was in the bcc2152647b8 ("Import 2.4.0-test3pre3").
Then somehow spread a bit (but not much).

And it shows how useful it is. Maybe it had some purpose a long time ago, but
at present time this code will never be executed since it cannot be built as
a module.

Are you sure about definition of __exitcall? As I read init.h the macro
is defined when it's not a MODULE.

I also tried to trace this back now, and from what I found, both
the __init_call and __exit_call annotations gained __attribute_used__
back in lniux-2.6.0 as a way to prevent both gcc-3.3 and gcc-3.4
from warning about unused functions or discarding initcalls that
are actually required.

My best guess is that __exit_call should just use
__attribute__((unused)) instead of __attribute__((used)) and
have the compiler drop it from built-in code instead of the linker:

But why do we need that at all? Can we just drop the full section for good.
Or i.o.w. where exactly is it being used in the current kernel?

-- 
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko