Messages in this thread |  | | From | Russell King <> | Subject | Re: how interesting are data->bss patches? | Date | Sun, 24 Sep 2000 09:05:59 +0100 (BST) |
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Peter Samuelson writes: > Not that any of us who don't do embedded projects ought to care very > much, but I was curious. I grepped test9pre6 for globals initialized > to 0 or NULL and came up with 2495 lines, first iteration.
I did kick it off, but I've not had the time recently to go through and find all the others; yes, there are a lot of them around in the kernel tree. The main problem anyone will face with this is that a lot of people remember when there wasn't a zero initialised bss in the kernel, and the tendency to initialise to zero has become a habbit, or is left in some ancient documents that new people read. But whatever the reason, patches still get generated which add code with explicit zero initialisers.
> A lot of recent Linus patches seem to have this conversion in them, so > it seems someone *does* care about image size. (Presumably people > running the kernel in-place from flash, right?) Would anyone be > interested in patches to uninitialize these variables?
Probably the best thing to do would be to send them to linux-kernel, other relevent mailing list or maintainer (see MAINTAINERS/CREDITS file) in small per-file chunks and copy them to Linus.
> (A related question: __initdata *does* have to be initialized, right?)
Yes. Anything that does into __initdata by definition has to be initialised, so there will be some zero initialisers left over. _____ |_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+- | | Russell King rmk@arm.linux.org.uk --- --- | | | | http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/personal/aboutme.html / / | | +-+-+ --- -+- / | THE developer of ARM Linux |+| /|\ / | | | --- | +-+-+ ------------------------------------------------- /\\\ | - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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