Re: [PATCH 1/2] kbuild: add target to install gzipped modules

[Michal Marek <mmarek@suse.cz>]

Dne 29.12.2011 16:50, Lucas De Marchi napsal(a):
> Add target in Makefile to compress the module after it's installed.
> Module-init-tools and libkmod can handle gzipped modules.

I am not convinced that this is a needed feature. Compressing elf files
means that depmod and modinfo need to read the whole compressed file
from disk and unpack it, while only a couple of bytes need to be read.
Those concerned about disk space either compile only the few needed
modules and/or use some compressed filesystem, which allows for random
access.


> This is not much useful for distributions because the package will gzip
> the modules and call depmod in a install rule. However for those
> compiling the kernel on their own and debugging module loading, it's
> useful so depmod doesn't have to be called twice and we don't have to
> manually compress the modules.

I understand that you need *.ko.gz support in kmod for the sake of
feature parity and that such patch would help you with debugging. But I
doubt there is use for it apart of developing kmod. Wouldn't an external
script like this do the same job for you?

#!/bin/sh
make "$@" modules_install
rel="$(make -s "$@" kernelrelease)"
find "/lib/modules/$rel" -name '*.ko' -exec gzip '{}' ';'
depmod "$rel"

Michal