Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 11 May 2006 14:43:18 +0100 | From | Christoph Hellwig <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 4/4] KBUILD: export-symbol usage report generator |
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On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 01:43:27PM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote: > linuxram@us.ibm.com (Ram Pai) writes: > > > From: Ram Pai <linuxram@us.ibm.com> > > > > The following patch provides the ability to generate a report of > > (1) All the exported symbols and their in-kernel-module usage count > > (2) For each module, lists the modules and their exported symbols, on > > which it depends. > > Very nice. > > One thing I always wanted to see was a more focussed EXPORT_SYMBOL. > > A lot of symbols are only exported for a single other module (e.g. most > of the networking exports are for IPv6) but are actually internal > and shouldn't be messed with by other modules. It would be nice > if name spaces could be defined that say "this export is only for > modules in this name space" and then e.g. have IPv6 be in the TCPINTERNALS > name space and nobody else. > > I think adding something like this could clean up the bewildering > jungle of exports greatly. > > _GPL is kind of like that already, but it is not fine grained enough.
I'd go even further and say every symbol should have a category. These catgories than could get labels such as mostly stable, public but volatile or internal (the latter is what's oddly named _GPL) now. That way a small look at a driver can say if it's doing something wrong, e.g. if a network driver imports symbols from anything but BASE, PCI and NETDEV something is most likely wrong. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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