Re: [patch 1/22] Add __early_param for all arches

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

trini@kernel.crashing.org wrote:
>
> Hello.  The following is outcome of talking with David Woodhouse about
> the need in various parts of the kernel to parse the command line very
> early and set some options based on what we read.  The result is
> __early_param("arg", fn) based very heavily on the macro of the same name
> in the arm kernel.  The following is the core of these changes, adding the
> macro, struct and externs to <linux/init.h>, the parser to init/main.c
> and converting console= to this format.  As a follow on to this thread are
> patches against all arches (vs 2.6.5-rc2) to use the global define of
> saved_command_line, add the appropriate bits to
> arch/$(ARCH)/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S and in some cases, convert params
> from the old arch-specific variant to the new __early_param way.

I don't recall seeing this requirement mentioned before, and that's a ton
of patches you have there.

Please tell us a little more about why we need these patches.  (Apart from
what seems to be a moderate amount of code consolidation).

Also, what is different between __setup and __early_setup?  Why is it not
possible to make __setup run sufficiently early for whatever application is
requiring these changes?

Thanks.