Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] kbuild: generate intermediate C files instead of copying _shipped files

[Masahiro Yamada]

Hi Linus,


Very sorry that I had not responded quickly.

When I was digging into tool version dependency,
as you pointed out, gperf is a problem (but seemed one time breakage
for gperf 3.1)
flex seemed very stable for a long time.
bison seemed a bit problem if old version is used.


But, I did not have enough time to take a closer look.
I thought I should respond after I tested more, but I has been pressed
by my daily tasks, then time passed...
Very sorry.



Today, I just noticed gperf usage got dropped from the kernel.

If CONFIG_MODVERSIONS is enabled,
I notice lots of error messages.
WARNING: EXPORT symbol "finish_open" [vmlinux] version generation
failed, symbol will not be


So, I think something was broken in scripts/genksyms/.

Of course, it was a trivial conversion, so it should not be hard to fix...



> gperf is clearly written by clowns that don't understand about
> compatibility issues - it would have been trivial for them to add some
> kind of marker define so that you could test for this directly rather
> than depend on some kind of autoconf "try to build and see if it
> fails" crap.


One idea may be to process the output of "gperf -v"
and embed GPERF_VERSION into the output .c files.

But, if you are unhappy with gperf breakage this time,
we can live without gperf.




> It's likely not even any slower, but who the hell knows.. Do we even
> care? It's almost certainly faster if you compare to generating that
> gperf code.
>

For scripts/kconfig/, I think we do not care at all
because we usually invoke it just once when we configure the build setting.


If we enable CONFIG_MODVERSIONS, scripts/genksyms/ is invoked
over and over again.

Sorry, I have not evaluated if
the perfect hash gives us noticeable advantage or not..



-- 
Best Regards
Masahiro Yamada