The introduction of the symbol namespace patches changed the way symbols are named in the ksymtab entries. That caused userland tools to fail (such as kmod's depmod). As depmod is used as part of the kernel build it was worth having another look whether this name change can be avoided.
The main purpose of this series is to restore the original ksymtab entry names. For that to happen and to remove some rough edges around that, the relevant parts in modpost got a small refactoring as to when and how namespaces are evaluated and set in the symbol struct. Eventually, the namespace values can be read from __kstrtabns_ entries and their corresponding __ksymtab_strings values. That removes the need to carry the namespace names within the (anyway unique) symbol name entries. The last patch of this series is adopted from Masahiro [1]. By allowing 'no namespace' to be represented as empty string, large chunks of include/linux/export.h could be consolidated. Technically, this last patch is not absolutely necessary to fix functionality. It addresses concerns about maintainability and readability. While I strongly suggest sending all of the patches for 5.4, the last one could possible deferred to the next merge window. This patch applies to the modules-linus [2] branch. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/ [2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jeyu/linux.git/log/?h=modules-linus Cc: Jessica Yu <[email protected]> Cc: Masahiro Yamada <[email protected]> Cc: Martijn Coenen <[email protected]> Cc: Lucas De Marchi <[email protected]> Cc: Shaun Ruffell <[email protected]> Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]> Cc: Will Deacon <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Matthias Maennich (4): modpost: delegate updating namespaces to separate function modpost: make updating the symbol namespace explict symbol namespaces: revert to previous __ksymtab name scheme export: avoid code duplication in include/linux/export.h include/linux/export.h | 97 +++++++++++++----------------------------- kernel/module.c | 2 +- scripts/mod/modpost.c | 58 ++++++++++++++++--------- scripts/mod/modpost.h | 1 + 4 files changed, 69 insertions(+), 89 deletions(-) -- 2.23.0.581.g78d2f28ef7-goog
