On Tue, 20 Nov 2012 13:23:42 +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 09:20:46AM +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:
quoted
Hi Bill,
On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 13:22:36 -0500, Bill Pemberton wrote:
quoted
CONFIG_HOTPLUG is going away as an option so __devinit is no longer
needed.
Can you please point me/us to the discussion explaining the rationale
behind this move, and the explanation of what will be done exactly?
While I can easily understand that we want to drop CONFIG_HOTPLUG and
always enable hot-plug support, I don't see where we are going with
removing __devinit annotations and the like.
It's actually very simple to understand.
1. CONFIG_HOTPLUG is going away; it's already defined to always be 'Y'.
2. This means that the the devinit sections will not be discarded anymore.
3. As a result, there's no point the devinit sections existing anymore.
4. As there's no devinit sections, the __devinit marker is entirely
redundant and useless.
Ah, yes, very simple indeed. Not sure how I managed to not understand
it earlier today. Thanks for explaining.
The reason this is being done is because the benefit to cost ratio of this
is far too high; it's well proven that people constantly get these markings
wrong, and with most kernels having had hotplug enabled anyway, it's not
providing much in the way of space saving benefit over the number of section
conflicts it causes. So, it's been decided a few years ago that this is
Yes, I completely agree.
going to happen, with that justification, and it's been accepted by 300
odd kernel developers in at least one kernel summit when it was talked
Probably that was one I didn't attend to, as I can't remember this
discussion.
about... and it's been mentioned on mailing lists several times.
Maybe LKML, which I don't read. So I wasn't aware of the plan before
seeing Bill's patches.
--
Jean Delvare