Re: [PATCH v8 4/4] fs: unicode: Add utf8 module and a unicode layer

[Shreeya Patel]

On 27/04/21 11:59 am, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 24, 2021 at 02:21:36AM +0530, Shreeya Patel wrote:
> > utf8data.h_shipped has a large database table which is an auto-generated
> > decodification trie for the unicode normalization functions.
> > We can avoid carrying this large table in the kernel unless it is required
> > by the filesystem during boot process.
> >
> > Hence, make UTF-8 encoding loadable by converting it into a module and
> > also add built-in UTF-8 support option for compiling it into the
> > kernel whenever required by the filesystem.
> The way this is implemement looks rather awkward.
>
> Given that the large memory usage is for a data table and not for code,
> why not treat is as a firmware blob and load it using request_firmware?


utf8 module not just has the data table but also has some kernel code.
The big part that we are trying to keep out of the kernel is a tree 
structure that gets traversed based on a key that is the file name.
This is done when issuing a lookup in the filesystem, which has to be 
very fast. So maybe it would not be so good to use request_firmware for
such a core feature.