Re: [PATCH 00/34] __initdata cleanup

Andrew Morton
2007-02-09T21:51:27Z

On Fri, 9 Feb 2007 18:37:34 +0100 (CET)
Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Heiko Carstens wrote:
>
> > And indeed all the __initdata annotated local and global variables on
> > s390 are in the init.data section. So I'm wondering what this patch
> > series is about. Or I must have missed something.
>
> I think it reaches back to times when gcc 2.7.* was still supported, which
> does behave as described in the documentation. gcc 2.95 and newer don't
> require explicit initialization anymore, so this has become a non-issue.
>

Yes, nobody's been observing any problems arising from this, and if this
memory was really uninitialised, people would be hitting problems.

I don't want to have to require that all __attribute__((section)) storage
be initialised - people will surely forget to do it and things will slip
through.

If we really do have a problem here it'd be better to fix it in some
central and global fashion: either by ensuring that each architecture's
startup code will zero this memory or by some compiler/linker option such
as -fno-common.