On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 01:17:00PM +0100, Matthias Maennich wrote:

The EXPORT_SYMBOL_NS() and EXPORT_SYMBOL_NS_GPL() macros can be used to
export a symbol to a specific namespace.  There are no _GPL_FUTURE and
_UNUSED variants because these are currently unused, and I'm not sure
they are necessary.

I didn't add EXPORT_SYMBOL_NS() for ASM exports; this patch sets the
namespace of ASM exports to NULL by default. In case of relative
references, it will be relocatable to NULL. If there's a need, this
should be pretty easy to add.

A module that wants to use a symbol exported to a namespace must add a
MODULE_IMPORT_NS() statement to their module code; otherwise, modpost
will complain when building the module, and the kernel module loader
will emit an error and fail when loading the module.

MODULE_IMPORT_NS() adds a modinfo tag 'import_ns' to the module. That
tag can be observed by the modinfo command, modpost and kernel/module.c
at the time of loading the module.

The ELF symbols are renamed to include the namespace with an asm label;
for example, symbol 'usb_stor_suspend' in namespace USB_STORAGE becomes
'usb_stor_suspend.USB_STORAGE'.  This allows modpost to do namespace
checking, without having to go through all the effort of parsing ELF and
relocation records just to get to the struct kernel_symbols.

On x86_64 I saw no difference in binary size (compression), but at
runtime this will require a word of memory per export to hold the
namespace. An alternative could be to store namespaced symbols in their
own section and use a separate 'struct namespaced_kernel_symbol' for
that section, at the cost of making the module loader more complex.

Co-developed-by: Martijn Coenen <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Martijn Coenen <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Matthias Maennich <maennich@google.com>

Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>