Re: [PATCH] init.h: discard exitcall symbols early

[Petr Mladek]

On Tue 2026-03-31 17:01:20, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2026, at 16:56, Petr Mladek wrote:
> > Adding module loader maintainers into Cc to make them aware of this
> > change.
> >
> > On Tue 2026-03-31 16:28:38, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> >> From: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx>
> >> 
> >> Any __exitcall() and built-in module_exit() handler is marked as __used,
> >> which leads to the code being included in the object file and later
> >> discarded at link time.
> >
> > Is this safe for dynamically loaded modules?
> >
> > Honestly, I am not sure what is the exact efect of this change.
> > The dynamically loadded modules just came to my mind...
> 
> In a loadable module, using __exitcall() directly already discards
> the function at link time, so there is no difference from built-in
> code. Actually using __exitcall() here is a mistake regardless
> of my patch.
> 
> Using module_exit() in a loadable module still behaves as before,
> this uses a different macro, which already has __maybe_unused:
> 
> #define module_exit(exitfn)                                     \
>         static inline exitcall_t __maybe_unused __exittest(void)                \
>         { return exitfn; }                                      \
>         void cleanup_module(void) __copy(exitfn)                \
>                 __attribute__((alias(#exitfn)));                \
>         ___ADDRESSABLE(cleanup_module, __exitdata);
> 
> so this is also unchanged.

I see, I was confused because cscope pointed me to:

/**
 * module_exit() - driver exit entry point
 * @x: function to be run when driver is removed
 *
 * module_exit() will wrap the driver clean-up code
 * with cleanup_module() when used with rmmod when
 * the driver is a module.  If the driver is statically
 * compiled into the kernel, module_exit() has no effect.
 * There can only be one per module.
 */
#define module_exit(x)	__exitcall(x);

and I missed that it was the variant for the built-in modules.

Best Regards,
Petr