On Fri, Oct 12, 2007 at 05:50:01PM +0100, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote: > We currently have infrastructure for discardable text and data, but no > such thing for strings. This is especially notable for inline strings > such as ones used by printk() which are left behind resident in the memory > throughout the life of the system even though code referring to them has > been removed. What is the actual benefit here expressed in real numbers? For the __init/__exit notation that is yet only partially correct we often see corner cases where one ask if it is really worth it. Adding the discard functionality for strings seems like a logical extension but there is a benefit/pain ratio to consider. So real numbers please. A few general notes to the patch. 1) We want to consolidate this in include/asm-generic/vmlinux* somehow and this should be doen as a separate step. 2) If we introduce discardable strings then we shall in parallel add build time checks so we catch strings marked as discardable which is used outside a discardable compatible function. Sam
