Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 09 May 2006 18:13:00 +0200 | From | Arjan van de Ven <> | Subject | Re: [patch 1/17] Infrastructure to mark exported symbols as unused-for-removal-soon |
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Andrew Morton wrote: > So hum. Don't you think it'd be better to look at each API as a whole, > make decisions about what parts of it _should_ be offered to modules, > rather then looking empirically at which parts presently _need_ to be > exported?
Well so far we as kernel developers have been rather bad at it, with the result that there are 900 unused ones roughly. Each export takes somewhere between 100 and 150 bytes. *WITHOUT ANY BENEFIT*. The reason to remove them all is to save that memory NOW. It's easy to add an export back later if it gets used. Yes that is churn, but it's minor churn. The price for not doing that is a bigger kernel for everyone, today, without any positive gain of that space..
(and this size excludes even those functions that aren't used at all, but are only there to be exported. Adrian has been working on removing the really unused functions in the kernel, via static marking and then gcc noticing the unusedness, but once they're exported that breaks down)
So I think personally it's worth biting the bullet. I expect 95% of those 900 to never ever come back. Those 5% will churn, sure. But, to a large degree, the fact that there's no user is an indication that the API may well not be right in the first place, or not in demand. - 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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