Re: [PATCH 1/2] kbuild: add target to install gzipped modules

2011/12/29 Michal Marek [off-list ref]:

Dne 29.12.2011 16:50, Lucas De Marchi napsal(a):

quoted

Add target in Makefile to compress the module after it's installed.
Module-init-tools and libkmod can handle gzipped modules.

I am not convinced that this is a needed feature. Compressing elf files
means that depmod and modinfo need to read the whole compressed file
from disk and unpack it, while only a couple of bytes need to be read.
Those concerned about disk space either compile only the few needed
modules and/or use some compressed filesystem, which allows for random
access.

quoted

This is not much useful for distributions because the package will gzip
the modules and call depmod in a install rule. However for those
compiling the kernel on their own and debugging module loading, it's
useful so depmod doesn't have to be called twice and we don't have to
manually compress the modules.

I understand that you need *.ko.gz support in kmod for the sake of
feature parity and that such patch would help you with debugging. But I
doubt there is use for it apart of developing kmod. Wouldn't an external
script like this do the same job for you?

#!/bin/sh
make "$@" modules_install
rel="$(make -s "$@" kernelrelease)"
find "/lib/modules/$rel" -name '*.ko' -exec gzip '{}' ';'
depmod "$rel"

Sure, but it has the same problem of running depmod twice. I was
thinking that compressed modules might be useful for others, not
developing kmod. At least I know Archlinux uses gzipped modules by
default and probably gentoo guys, too.


Lucas De Marchi