On Thursday, November 24, 2016 6:53:22 PM CET Nicholas Piggin wrote: > > > > > Google tells me > > > Linus is not a neutral bystander on the topic of symbol versioning, so I'm > > > bracing for a robust response (actually I don't much care either way, I'm > > > happy to put a couple of bandaids on it and keep it going) > > > > There are tools that people are working on to make it more obvious where > > API breaks happen by looking at the .o debug data instead of our crazy > > current system (which is really better than nothing), perhaps we should > > start using them instead? > > > > See here for more details about this: > > https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2016/talks/would-an-abi-changes-visualization-tool-be-useful-to-linux-kernel-maintenance/ > > Hmm. I guess it's basically similar to modversions, so has downsides of not > detecting a semantic change unless it changes the type. But still, if we could > replace our custom code with a tool like this for modversions functionality, > that alone would be a massive improvement. But requiring debug info might be > a bit of a show stopper. I also don't know if that would handle asm functions. It's certainly not an option for v4.9 at this point. There is also no realistic way we can get a correct asm/asm-prototypes.h for all the other architectures in place. At the moment, powerpc is the only one that actually works with modversions. We can either make CONFIG_MODVERSIONS a per-architecture opt-in and let only the ones that have the header file select that, or revert all of Al's original patches that moved the exports. Arnd -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kbuild" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html