Re: [PATCH] x86: fix unconditional arch/x86/kernel/pcspeaker.c compiling

[Michael Opdenacker <michael-lists@free-electrons.com>]

On 01/18/2008 04:16 AM, Taral wrote:
> On 1/17/08, Michael Opdenacker <michael-lists@free-electrons.com> wrote:
>   
>> Another issue would be that we would no longer be able
>> to load the speaker driver module from a kernel which
>> wasn't originally compiled with support for this module.
>>     
>
> Have you looked at pcspeaker.o? As far as I can tell, it does *nothing*.
>   
Do you mean "almost nothing"? It still allocates and adds a platform
device, and the corresponding function always gets called at boot time.

I know that not compiling this piece of code just reduces the
uncompressed kernel size by just a few bytes (218). However, many small
contributions of this kind can have a significant impact on embedded
systems (or on boot media or on Linux based bootloaders).

As I said earlier, I'm starting to think that this trick should only be
used when CONFIG_EMBEDDED is set. In the non-embedded case, it's
probably not acceptable not to declare a platform device that is always
present in the system (while it's perfectly fine not to load the
corresponding driver).

Your comments and suggestions are more than welcome!

Michael.

-- 
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