Hello,

On Mon, Jan 09, 2017 at 09:28:12PM +0100, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

quoted

So, to avoid that, we can just kmalloc and kfree the buffer, but it
seems like a silly complication to work around bugs in some
bootloaders.  There are many places in kernel where we're liberal
about __initdata which is great.  I'm not sure complicating all those
places for a broken bootloader is a good idea.

Sure. We cannot avoid that kernels (esp. multiplatform) keep on growing.

But when I see a new 4KiB-sized buffer, i'm always suspicious...
A few years ago, I caught someone miscalculating shifts, leading
to a static buffer that was 256 times larger than intended ;-)

Oh, sure, things like the protocol string table are just stupid and
it's great that you caught it.  I just don't think it makes sense to
scrutinize bss __initdata.  It's not in kernel image and goes away
once the kernel boots.  It's okay to a bit liberal with them for the
sake of simplicity.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun