Re: [BUG] 4.9.0 build error on Alpha

["Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro@linux-mips.org>]

Bob,

> Credit to all who participated in working this issue.  Matt -- attached
> is a patch set to be applied against the kernel.org 4.9.0 source tree.
> If it passes inspection, please approve and forward upstream.
> 
> Apologies for not including in-line, but I don't trust my mailer to
> preserve formatting unless I send as an attachment.

 Thanks for your contribution; you need to add a `Signed-off-by' tag 
though for your change to go anywhere.

 Also I think the <asm/uaccess.h> part will need some further work; at the 
very least the comment needs to be updated to state why the conditional 
has now been hardwired.  Ultimately I think all the hackery can go and 
`__copy_tofrom_user_nocheck' and `__clear_user' be replaced with direct 
calls to `__copy_user' and `__do_clear_user' respectively (and 
`__do_clear_user' renamed to `__clear_user' at the same time) as the +/- 
4MiB branch range is too low these days to guarantee a kernel binary to 
fit within.

 Alternatively a configuration option might be added for the branch 
optimisation to stay instead if selected, perhaps also adding the 
`-msmall-text' compiler option to let small configurations take advantage 
of it globally rather than just in <asm/uaccess.h>.  This might not be 
liked by people running build bots though as it would inevitably cause 
some configurations to fail linking.

  Maciej