From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932268AbWIGQbl (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Sep 2006 12:31:41 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932273AbWIGQbl (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Sep 2006 12:31:41 -0400 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:9447 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932268AbWIGQbk (ORCPT ); Thu, 7 Sep 2006 12:31:40 -0400 Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 09:27:38 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Kirill Korotaev Cc: Olaf Hering , Adrian Bunk , Kirill Korotaev , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Andrey Mirkin , devel@openvz.org, mikpe@it.uu.se, sam@ravnborg.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] fail kernel compilation in case of unresolved symbols (v2) Message-Id: <20060907092738.f4088e7d.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: <45003985.7060304@sw.ru> References: <44FFEE5D.2050905@openvz.org> <20060907110513.GA22319@aepfle.de> <20060907111329.GI25473@stusta.de> <20060907122607.GA22882@aepfle.de> <45003985.7060304@sw.ru> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 2.2.7 (GTK+ 2.8.6; i686-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:23:49 +0400 Kirill Korotaev wrote: > Olaf Hering wrote: > > On Thu, Sep 07, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > > > > >>If any module shipped with the kernel has in any configuration > >>unresolved symbols that's a bug that should be reported, not ignored. > > > > > > Yes, but on request when building the package. Not per default. > > I probably missed the reason why this is now suddenly a problem. > It is not that sudden at all. I experienced this problem many times so far > and working with a build system came to the idea of failing > builds when there are unresolved symbols. > > I'm pretty sure that having this patch in mainstream > will make unresolved symbols a rare problem as many of them will be fixed soon. > So I'm pretty agree with Adrian that modules with unresolved symbols is a bug > and it MUST be fixed. > I would be very much interested to hear Andrew opinion on this as > he probably makes kernels even more often than any of us :) > Am sympathetic to the idea. Some architectures (eg sparc64) generate large numbers of unresolved module symbol warnings during an allmodconfig build. It's not a big problem in practice - these are subsystems which everyone statically links anyway. But it does mean that additional work needs to be done if we want to prevent these allmodconfig builds from erroring out.