On Fri, 25 Nov 2016 10:00:46 -0800 Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 24, 2016 at 4:40 PM, Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> > >> Yes, manual "marking" is never going to be a viable solution. > > > > I guess it really depends on how exactly you want to use it. For distros > > that do stable ABI but rarely may have to break something for security > > reasons, it should work and give exact control. > > No. Because nobody else will care, so unless it's like a single symbol > or something, it will just be a maintenance nightmare. Yeah that's true, and as I realized a distro can rename a symbol if they make incompatible changes which happens very rarely. Avoids having to carry some whole infrastructure upstream for it. > > > What else do people *actually* use it for? Preventing mismatched modules > > when .git version is not attached and release version of the kernel has > > not been bumped. Is that it? > > It used to be very useful for avoiding loading stale modules and then > wasting days on debugging something that wasn't the case when you had > forgotten to do "make modules_install". Change some subtle internal > ABI issue (add/remove a parameter, whatever) and it would really help. > > These days, for me, LOCALVERSION_AUTO and module signing are what I > personally tend to use. > > The modversions stuff may just be too painful to bother with. Very few > people probably use it, and the ones that do likely don't have any > overriding reason why. > > So I'd personally be ok with just saying "let's disable it for now", > and see if anybody even notices and cares, and then has a good enough > explanation of why. It's entirely possible that most users are "I > enabled it ten years ago, I didn't even realize it was still in my > defconfig". That sounds good. Should we try to get 4.9 working (which we could do relatively easily with a few arch reverts), and then disable modversions for 4.10? (at which point we can un-revert Al's arch patches) Thanks, Nick -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
