Re: Moving zlib so that others may use it

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

kaos@ocs.com.au said:
>  I am assuming that you can satisfy hpa's concerns about using a
> single version of zlib for everybody.  Also note that arch/ppc/boot/
> lib has its own version of zlib which is quite different to the
> others.  First make sure that you can build one version of zlib that
> works for everybody. 

I can confirm that the JFFS2 and PPP zlib are compatible - differing in 
cosmetics only. Moving it to lib/zlib would be a good thing.

We can verify compatibility for other zlib users as an when those other
users are converted to use lib/zlib instead of their own private copy.


> The best option is to build zlib.o for the kernel (not module) and
> store it in lib.a.  Compile zlib.o if any consumer of zlib has been
> selected and add a dummy reference to zlib code in vmlinux to ensure
> that zlib is pulled from the archive if anybody needs it, even if all
> the consumers are in modules. 

AUIU you've since decided this isn't necessary - which is good. Making the
static kernel image differ according to which modules happened to be
compiled at the time is not a good thing. Sometimes we do it, but we should
avoid it when we can.

If zlib.o is used in modules only, compile it as a module. Don't put it 
into the kernel.

--
dwmw2