[OLPC-devel] Re: [PATCH 0/4] Compile kernel with -fwhole-program --combine

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 19:15 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> It's probably true, but the way it's done today gave us CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
> and EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL, which would break when turning EXPORT_SYMBOL into a
> simple __attribute__(). 

ELF can do symbol versioning too. But I don't really see a simple way to
make normal ELF linking work with a kernel like that. The vmlinux ELF
file is long gone by the time the kernel boots -- it needs its own
mechanism for managing its symbols anyway; its own internal dynamic
linker. I suppose you _could_ make it work from the standard ELF linkage
but I don't think it'd be fun.

ObMODVERSIONS: Forgot to mention that my makefile hacks for --combine
break that completely. It tries to preprocess all the files together
with 'gcc -E -D__GENKSYMS__ *.c' -- and you can't do that. 

-- 
dwmw2