On Friday 03 January 2014, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote: > On Fri, Jan 03, 2014 at 01:10:09PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > > Aside from the good comments that Russell made, I would remark that the > > fact that you need multiple megabytes worth of modules indicates that you > > are doing something wrong. Can you point to a git tree containing those > > modules? > > From the comments which have been made, one point that seems to have > been identified is that if this module is first stripped and then > loaded, it can load, but if it's unstripped, it's too big. This sounds > suboptimal to me - the debug info shouldn't be loaded into the kernel. Reading the layout_and_allocate() function, that is probably the intention already, and if something goes wrong there on ARM, it could be fixed up in an arch specific module_frob_arch_sections() function. > However, I guess there's bad interactions with module signing if you > don't do this and the module was signed with the debug info present, > so I don't think there's a good solution for this. My point was another anyway: I can't think of any good reason why you would end up with this many modules on any sane system. The only cases I've seen so far are - modules written in C++, with libstdc++ linked into the module - a closed-source platform port hidden in a loadable module that contains all the device drivers and subsystems while ignoring the infrastructure we have in the kernel, and the possible legal implications. - a bug in the module using large arrays that should just be dynamically allocated. - device firmware statically linked into the module rather than loaded using request_firmware. In each of these cases, the real answer is to fix the code they are trying to load to do things in a more common way, especially if the intention is to eventually merge the code upstream. It is of course possible that they are indeed trying something valid, that's why I asked to see the source code. Arnd -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>