Re: i386-vmlinuxldss-distinguish-absolute-symbols.patch added to -mm tree

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> writes:

> Coywolf Qi Hunt <coywolf@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I wonder why this patch
>>  (i386-vmlinuxldss-distinguish-absolute-symbols.patch) isn't merged?
>
> Sam said scary things about it at the time but yes, it seems that things
> ended up OK.
>
> But Eric hasn't come back with the patch (>3 months) so perhaps its not
> very important, or is unneeded?

Mostly this is a piece of making the kernel relocatable, and I
have been holding off on that set of patches until I can get
the rest of the patches I have worked on for kexec on panic
merged.

I can only track so many bug reports at a time :)

This patch stands by itself so it should not be a problem.

One of the things I discovered when working with this patch is
that ld when can't actually cope with absolute symbols in a shared
library and will try and relocate them anyway.  I have code in my
tree that works around that particular ld bug but it is nowhere near
as nice as just specifying -shared when linking.  This patch is indeed
needed for that.

Eric