Re: drivers/video/backlight/mbp_nvidia_bl.c:114: error: storage size of '__mod_dmi_device_table' isn't known

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

On Sat, 2008-11-15 at 02:41 +0300, Alexey Dobriyan wrote:
> How can this work, given that MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE line expands into
> 
>         extern const struct dmi_device_id __mod_dmi_device_table
> __attribute__ ((unused, alias("mbp_device_table")));
>                                 ^^^^^^
> but there is no struct dmi_device_id, there is struct dmi_system_id?

Interesting question ;)

It actually looks like this...

static struct dmi_system_id __initdata mbp_device_table[] = {
	...
};

extern const struct dmi_device_id __mod_dmi_device_table \
		__attribute__ ((unused, alias("mbp_device_table")));

So 'struct dmi_device_id' isn't ever really used -- it's just like a
forward declaration of a struct, and the compiler doesn't care because
it never needs to know anything more about that struct.

Not ideal though -- we should probably see if we can fix it. I suspect
it's not worth a global change of dmi_system_id to dmi_device_id
though... got any better ideas?

Maybe we could change MODULE_GENERIC_TABLE to be more agnostic about the
datatype -- just call it and 'extern char'. After all, it's only for the
linker.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse@intel.com                              Intel Corporation