Re: [RFC] ARM binutils feature churn causing kernel problems

From: Paulo Marques
Date: Thu Oct 07 2004 - 07:51:17 EST


Rusty Russell wrote:
On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 23:14, Russell King wrote:

On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 01:57:15PM +0100, Richard Earnshaw wrote:

Why don't you pass s to is_arm_mapping_symbol and have it do the same
thing as you've done in get_ksymbol?

"sym_entry" is not an ELF symtab structure - it's a parsed version
of the `nm' output, and as such does not contain the symbol type nor
binding information.


I believe that Paulo (CC'd) ended up with a patch which included the
actual type information in /proc/kallsyms. Paulo, what's the status of
that patch?

That patch is in the -mm tree, and has been there for a while, so it is pretty much stable by now. There were 4 seperate patches, but since they were pretty much dependant, I think akpm merged them into "kallsyms-data-size-reduction--lookup-speedup.patch".

For those who don't know what the patch is about, it changes the format of the compressed kallsyms, so that they occupy less space, decompress faster (a lot faster) and include the same type char that was output by nm.

The code in kernel/kallsyms.c handles "aliases" (symbols with the same address) in a way that it shows a consistent output: the symbol shown is always the first. This can be easily changed, but I didn't want to change the old behavior.

The patch by Russel King seems ok to me, although I prefer Rusty's idea of not using any symbol that is not in the form "[A-Za-z0-9_]+". We just need to check if there are any real world users of these "weird" symbols.

If this seems ok to everyone I can cook up a patch to do this.

--
Paulo Marques - www.grupopie.com

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.
Farmers' Almanac, 1978
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/