[OpenAFS-devel] detecting exported symbols

[Derek Atkins]

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:

> Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU> writes:
> 
> > Looking at the patch at CVSweb (yea, I was lazy in my earlier mail),
> > it looks like this patch necessarily forces the user to use modversions.
> > Are you sure that you want to force that behavior?  Yes, it's what
> > people _should_ do, but do you necessarily want to require it?
> 
> Note that Linus, last I heard, was strongly recommending *against*
> modversions.

Oh?  This is certainly a change from his previous stance.  Do you
have a source for this statement?

The biggest problem with modversions is that they are so fragile, and
the "kernel developers" don't work to make sure the interfaces remain
stable within "stable" releases.  So you wind up compiling N different
configuration of a kernel and wind up with N different sets of
modversions.  OTOH, modules wont necessarily work across those
different configurations, so you need modversions to detect that a
structure or interface changed.

If Linux actually had a stable DDI then this wouldn't be an issue.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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