Commit bc081dd6e9 ("kbuild: generate modules.builtin") added
infrastructure to generate modules.builtin, the list of all
builtin modules.
Basically, it works like this:
- Kconfig generates include/config/tristate.conf, the list of
tristate CONFIG options with a value in a capital letter.
- scripts/Makefile.modbuiltin makes Kbuild descend into
directories to collect the information of builtin modules.
I am not a big fan of it because Kbuild ends up with traversing
the source tree twice.
I am not sure how perfectly it should work, but this approach cannot
avoid false positives; even if the relevant CONFIG option is tristate,
some Makefiles forces obj-m to obj-y.
Some examples are:
arch/powerpc/platforms/powermac/Makefile:
obj-$(CONFIG_NVRAM:m=y) += nvram.o
net/ipv6/Makefile:
obj-$(subst m,y,$(CONFIG_IPV6)) += inet6_hashtables.o
net/netlabel/Makefile:
obj-$(subst m,y,$(CONFIG_IPV6)) += netlabel_calipso.o
Nobody has complained about (or noticed) it, so it is probably fine to
have false positives in modules.builtin.
This commit simplifies the implementation. Let's exploit the fact
that every module has MODULE_LICENSE(). (modpost shows a warning if
MODULE_LICENSE is missing. If so, 0-day bot would already have blocked
such a module.)
I added MODULE_FILE to <linux/module.h>. When the code is being compiled
as builtin, it will be filled with the file path of the module, and
collected into modules.builtin.info. Then, scripts/link-vmlinux.sh
extracts the list of builtin modules out of it.
This new approach fixes the false-positives above, but adds another
type of false-positives; non-modular code may have MODULE_LICENSE()
by mistake. This is not a big deal, it is just the code is always
orphan. We can clean it up if we like. You can see cleanup examples by:
$ git log --grep='make.* explicitly non-modular'
To sum up, this commits deletes lots of code, but still produces almost
equivalent results. Please note it does not increase the vmlinux size at
all. As you can see in include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h, the .modinfo
section is discarded in the link stage.
Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>