Re: [PATCH] kobject: Always build in kernel/ksysfs.o.

[Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 09:03:44AM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 06:12:34PM +0900, Paul Mundt wrote:
> > kernel/ksysfs.c seems to be a random dumping group for misc globals
> > that the rest of the tree depend on. This has caused problems with
> > exports in the past when sysfs is disabled, which can already be
> > observed in commit-id 51107301b629640f9ab76fe23bf385e187b9ac29.
> > 
> > The latest one is the kernel_kobj usage, which presently results in:
> > 
> > fs/built-in.o: In function `debugfs_init':
> > inode.c:(.init.text+0xc34): undefined reference to `kernel_kobj'
> > make: *** [.tmp_vmlinux1] Error 1
> > 
> > kernel/ksysfs.c itself at this point only contains globals and some
> > basic sysfs initialization, the sysfs initialization code is optimized
> > out when we build with sysfs disabled. Given that, it's easier to just
> > build in unconditionally, rather than trying to find some other random
> > place to dump and initialize the globals.
> > 
> > Additionally, the current trend seems to be decoupling of kobjects from
> > sysfs, in which case it still makes sense to perform the kernel_kobj
> > initialization that happens here even if sysfs is disabled, as
> > lib/kobject.o is built-in unconditionally.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
> 
> I'll take this, it looks right, but I don't think it fixes the
> kernel_kobj problem, that shows up in a number of other places too.  I'm
> working on fixing that up properly right now, give me a day, I'm doing
> builds with tons of different kernel options :)
> 
Thanks. At least it makes the link error go away, which is the only
kernel_kobj problem I had. If there's a greater conceptual problem with
kernel_kobj, that's out of scope for this patch, and I defer to you on
such matters ;-)