Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] x86/build: Get rid of vmlinux postlink step

Linus Torvalds
2025-02-24T20:00:00Z

On Mon, 24 Feb 2025 at 10:51, Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> But in terms of justification for upstreaming, the reduction in
> complexity alone makes it worth it IMO:
>
> 19 files changed, 52 insertions(+), 87 deletions(-)

Yeah, absolutely. Our fancy make build rules still have too many of
the phony forced targets, but this is a few less of them and makes the
build confirm (more) to the usual rules.

I do wonder if we could just get rid of that
CONFIG_ARCH_VMLINUX_NEEDS_RELOCS entirely and make it just be how all
architectures do it.

Yes, it was apparently "just" riscv/s390/x86/mips that did that
'strip_relocs' hack, but at the same time that whole pass *feels*
entirely generic.

IOW, this all makes me just wonder why other architectures don't do it?

Linus