Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 21 Apr 2009 02:01:57 -0400 (EDT) | From | Tim Abbott <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH v2 0/4] Add support for compiling with -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections |
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On Mon, 20 Apr 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Are there any advantages outside of the size things?
The main reason I'm interested in these patches is that they are needed by the Ksplice rebootless update system.
The Ksplice developers have been working to make Ksplice mergeable into mainline for about a year now. I think it would be best for everyone if Ksplice were merged before it gets shipped as a feature of a distribution or as a widely deployed standalone product.
Ksplice, Inc., the company behind Ksplice, has been doing deployments of a commercial rebootless update service based on Ksplice for several months now. Once we make a variant of this service freely available for a community Linux distribution later this year, we anticipate that many deployed Linux systems will be running Ksplice. We'd like to be good community members and merge Ksplice before that happens.
We broke off this -ffunction-sections patch series from the main Ksplice patch series because it has significant independent interest and thus could be merged first.
We are not asking you to make a decision at this time on whether or not Ksplice should be merged. However, this -ffunction-sections patch series is essentially the entire portion of the Ksplice patch series that touches the rest of the kernel, so merging this patch series will make it much easier to forward port Ksplice to new kernels or to merge Ksplice in the future.
-Tim Abbott
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