Re: [GIT PULL] RISC-V Patches for the 6.14 Merge Window, Part 1

[Linus Torvalds]

On Fri, 31 Jan 2025 at 18:00, Eric Biggers <ebiggers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> FYI this pull request added a 90KB ELF binary at
> scripts/selinux/genheaders/genheaders in the following commit:

Grr. And yes, I missed that entirely. It's the stale version of a
build-time executable that is now called security/selinux/genheaders.
It got renamed some time ago.

We actually have code to get rid of stale copies of that file exactly
*because* the renaming caused annoying left-overs in peoples build
trees that "make clean" didn't get rid of (because "make clean" just
cleaned up the *new* location). So renaming generated files easily
causes stale files to be left around.

So it gets removed automatically by

   ./scripts/remove-stale-files

But that removal happens as part of 'archprepare', and I suspect this
got committed before the stale file removal, and then the commit got
rebased (Author date of commit: last August. Commit date: this
Wednesday. Date of genheaders moving: September)

> Presumably a mistake, or else something a lot more interesting.

Well, unlikely to be anything more interesting, since the only thing
that is ever done with that file is removing it. It's not actually
ever *run*.

But yes, very annoying to have this in the kernel git history now,
even if I'll obviously get rid of it.

Thanks for noticing.

                   Linus