From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Mosberger Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2004 07:02:26 +0000 Subject: strict rejection of init -> core references causes problems Message-Id: <16622.17154.117052.31601@napali.hpl.hp.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org Tony, The recent patch of yours to the kernel module loader is causing some problems with the netfilter modules. To recap, with that patch applied, calls from the core section of a module to an init section are rejected because that's in general a dangerous thing to do (the called code may be gone by the time the call gets executed). I'm not terribly familiar with the netfilter code, but I think the problem there comes from the fact that some code is shared between init and exit handlers and that shared code ends up in the module core. For example, ip_nat_standalone.c:init_or_cleanup() may call ip_nat_rule_init(), which is marked as an __init function. This happens to be safe because ip_nat_rule_init() is only called during module-initialization. Seems to me like a dangerous practice, but if it's common practice, I suppose we don't have much choice but to allow calls from core to init sections again. Perhaps someone from the netfilter team could comment? --david