On Fri, 9 Feb 2007 18:37:34 +0100 (CET)
Roman Zippel [off-list ref] wrote:

Hi,

On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Heiko Carstens wrote:

quoted

And indeed all the __initdata annotated local and global variables on
s390 are in the init.data section. So I'm wondering what this patch
series is about. Or I must have missed something.

I think it reaches back to times when gcc 2.7.* was still supported, which 
does behave as described in the documentation. gcc 2.95 and newer don't 
require explicit initialization anymore, so this has become a non-issue.

Yes, nobody's been observing any problems arising from this, and if this
memory was really uninitialised, people would be hitting problems.

I don't want to have to require that all __attribute__((section)) storage
be initialised - people will surely forget to do it and things will slip
through.

If we really do have a problem here it'd be better to fix it in some
central and global fashion: either by ensuring that each architecture's
startup code will zero this memory or by some compiler/linker option such
as -fno-common.