Re: [PATCH][RFC] disable built-in modules V2

From: Malcolm Rowe
Date: Wed Apr 06 2005 - 09:29:43 EST


Magnus Damm writes:
Regardless of anything else, won't this break booting with initcall_debug on
PPC64/IA64 machines? (see the definition of print_fn_descriptor_symbol() in
kallsyms.h)

Correct, thanks for pointing that out. The code below is probably better:

static void __init do_initcalls(void)
{
initcall_t *call;
@@ -547,6 +558,9 @@ static void __init do_initcalls(void)
for (call = __initcall_start; call < __initcall_end; call++) {
char *msg;

+ if (!*call)
+ continue;
+
if (initcall_debug) {
printk(KERN_DEBUG "Calling initcall 0x%p", *call);
print_fn_descriptor_symbol(": %s()", (unsigned
long) *call);

Yes, that looks more sensible. It hides the fact that the initcall ever existed, rather than explicitly telling you that it's been skipped, but I don't imagine that that's ever going to cause a problem in practice (i.e., I don't think anyone would ever enable "force_ohci1394=off" by mistake and also without noticing).


And I guess the idea of replacing the initcall pointer with NULL will
work both with and without function descriptors, right? So we should
be safe on IA64 and PPC64.

I think so, though I don't really know a great deal about this area.


An IA64 descriptor is of the form { &code, &data_context }, and a function pointer is a pointer to such a descriptor. Presumably, setting a function pointer to NULL will either end up setting the pointer-to-descriptor to NULL or the code pointer to NULL, but either way, I would expect the 'if (!*call)' comparison to work as intended.


Best thing would be to get someone on IA64 and/or PPC64 to check this for you. Also might be worth checking that the patch works as intended with CONFIG_MODULES=n (assuming you haven't already).


Regards,
Malcolm
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