Re: [PATCH] removal of "static foo = 0"

Andrea Arcangeli
2000-11-27T17:52:05Z

On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 12:39:55AM -0800, David S. Miller wrote:
> Also I believe linkers are allowed to arbitrarily reorder members in
> the data and bss sections. I could be wrong on this one though.

I'm not sure either, but we certainly rely on that behaviour somewhere.
Just to make an example fs/dquot.c:

int nr_dquots, nr_free_dquots;

kernel/sysctl.c:

{FS_NRDQUOT, "dquot-nr", &nr_dquots, 2*sizeof(int),

The above is ok also on mips in practice though.

In 2.2.x there was more of them.

Regardless if we're allowed to rely on the ordering the above is bad coding
practice because somebody could forget about the dependency on the ordering and
put something between nr_dquotes and nr_free_dquotes :), so such dependency
should be avoided anyways...

Andrea