Matthias Maennich
8651ec01da
The EXPORT_SYMBOL_NS() and EXPORT_SYMBOL_NS_GPL() macros can be used to export a symbol to a specific namespace. There are no _GPL_FUTURE and _UNUSED variants because these are currently unused, and I'm not sure they are necessary. I didn't add EXPORT_SYMBOL_NS() for ASM exports; this patch sets the namespace of ASM exports to NULL by default. In case of relative references, it will be relocatable to NULL. If there's a need, this should be pretty easy to add. A module that wants to use a symbol exported to a namespace must add a MODULE_IMPORT_NS() statement to their module code; otherwise, modpost will complain when building the module, and the kernel module loader will emit an error and fail when loading the module. MODULE_IMPORT_NS() adds a modinfo tag 'import_ns' to the module. That tag can be observed by the modinfo command, modpost and kernel/module.c at the time of loading the module. The ELF symbols are renamed to include the namespace with an asm label; for example, symbol 'usb_stor_suspend' in namespace USB_STORAGE becomes 'usb_stor_suspend.USB_STORAGE'. This allows modpost to do namespace checking, without having to go through all the effort of parsing ELF and relocation records just to get to the struct kernel_symbols. On x86_64 I saw no difference in binary size (compression), but at runtime this will require a word of memory per export to hold the namespace. An alternative could be to store namespaced symbols in their own section and use a separate 'struct namespaced_kernel_symbol' for that section, at the cost of making the module loader more complex. Co-developed-by: Martijn Coenen <maco@android.com> Signed-off-by: Martijn Coenen <maco@android.com> Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Signed-off-by: Matthias Maennich <maennich@google.com> Signed-off-by: Jessica Yu <jeyu@kernel.org>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.