On Thu, 9 October 2008 18:21:51 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > The building blocks that would be useful are IMHO: > - a make target that generates a report for one kernel > (like the checkstack or export_report targets) > - a script that compares two such reports and outputs the > size differences > > That's also easy to do, and if that's what's wanted I can send a patch > that does it. > > Everything else is IMHO overdesigned. Please do. > The real problem is that dumping some scripts into the kernel sources > or publishing some data on a webpage doesn't make people use them. > > Like if you run "make checkstack" on the kernel today you can see that > drivers allocate arrays > 1 kB on the stack despite checkstack being > available... Funny you should mention that. Yesterday I noticed that make checkstack had been ported to five more architectures since my last look at the code. It doesn't seem likely that those ports were required by some pointy-haired boss for feature-completeness. Someone must actually be using it. The very beauty of make checkstack is that you don't even notice whether it is being used or not. You point to some drivers that apparently didn't use it, which is fine. But how many drivers _did_ use it? How many problems have been solved before the patches have ever been posted for review? Noone knows. And that is a good thing. We want the problems to get solved and not become visible in the first place. Bloatwatch imo has the design flaw that it is a central tool hosted on some server somewhere and only documents the damage once it has happened. It would be much better if every developer could run something simple locally and clean up the mess before anyone else notices. I partially agree with you in one point. It would be even better if checkstack, bloatcheck, etc. were run automatically on every kernel compile and developers were forced to look at any problems that come up. But that would increase compile time, which is bad. So there needs to be an off button as well, as there is for sparse - where off is the default. Jörn -- But this is not to say that the main benefit of Linux and other GPL software is lower-cost. Control is the main benefit--cost is secondary. -- Bruce Perens -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
