Re: 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 - Mostly working, with a kbuild oddity

Sam Ravnborg
2007-09-19T17:39:40Z

On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 11:53:23AM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 09:34:02 +0200, Sam Ravnborg said:
>
> > > I had a few issues with some other modules, but they're evil binaries so
> > > I'm taking those up directly with the companies involved.. ;)
> >
> > How annoying is this - and is this the CFLAGS thing again?
>
> The other issues were VMWare and the removal of EXPORT_SYMBOL(set_dumpable),
> and NVidia graphics driver not playing nice with x86_64-mm-cpa-clflush.patch
> (these actually broke back around -rc[34]-mm1, so it's not a new issue). I
> just had to spend 5 minutes re-checking that my workarounds did/didn't need
> refreshing. Like I said, their problems (and mine), not lkml's.
>
> > We could introduce some workaraound so we continue to respect
> > the CFLAGS settings in a Makefile for a while.
> > But at the end of the day we should convince the external module people
> > to follow the Kbuild docs. So it will then be temporary.
>
> I already sent the author a patch for the broken Makefile. I don't think an
> in-tree workaround is the right thing here. I've vote for an entry in the
> "What's new in 2.6.2X" document when the kbuild changes go mainline, since
> fixing it to use EXTRA_CFLAGS worked perfectly.
Very good suggestion. I will try to make it happen when this hit mainline.
Thanks!

> External module maintainers
> have (presumably) already read stable-API-nonsense, and should be used to
> fixing code for new releases, so a 1 or 2 line Makefile tweak shouldn't be a
> hardship.

No but then on the other hand I do not want to make life too dificult for
the (non-binary) external modules.
I will keep an eye out for additional CFLAGS mis-use and if I get no more than
a few report I will no do the backward compatibility thing.

Sam