The question is how to provide a similar guarantee if a different way?
As a tool to aid distro reviewers, modversions has some value, but the
debug info parsing tools that have been mentioned in this thread seem
superior (not that I've tested them).
On the other hand the big advantage of modversions is that it also
verifies the checksum during runtime (module loading). In other words, I
believe that any other solution should still generate some form of
checksum/watermark which can be easily checked for compatibility on
module load.
It should not be hard to add to the DWARF based tools though. We'd just
parse DWARF data instead of the C code.
A runtime check is still done, with per-module vermagic which distros
can change when they bump the ABI version. Is it really necessary to
have more than that (i.e., per-symbol versioning)?
From my point of view, it is. We need to allow changing ABI for some
modules while maintaining it for others.
In fact I think that there should be version not only for every exported
symbol (in the EXPORT_SYMBOL() sense), but also for every public type
(in the sense of eg. structure defined in the public header file).
Thanks,
-Stanislav
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