Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S934016AbcLIQRJ (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 Dec 2016 11:17:09 -0500 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:60680 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S933449AbcLIQRG (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 Dec 2016 11:17:06 -0500 Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2016 11:16:51 -0500 From: Don Zickus To: Nicholas Piggin Cc: Linus Torvalds , skozina@redhat.com, Ben Hutchings , Michal Marek , Adam Borowski , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Linux Kbuild mailing list , Debian kernel maintainers , "linux-arch@vger.kernel.org" , Arnd Bergmann , Ingo Molnar , Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: [PATCH] x86/kbuild: enable modversions for symbols exported from asm Message-ID: <20161209161651.GB35881@redhat.com> References: <30bb2db4-47bd-0c35-8328-ef032b551f06@suse.com> <20161129195721.GI2697@decadent.org.uk> <20161201051852.28dc335f@roar.ozlabs.ibm.com> <20161201041325.GX35881@redhat.com> <20161201153215.43b6cec7@roar.ozlabs.ibm.com> <20161201152039.GB35881@redhat.com> <20161209135041.5ff12770@roar.ozlabs.ibm.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20161209135041.5ff12770@roar.ozlabs.ibm.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.23.1 (2014-03-12) X-Greylist: Sender IP whitelisted, not delayed by milter-greylist-4.5.16 (mx1.redhat.com [10.5.110.30]); Fri, 09 Dec 2016 16:17:06 +0000 (UTC) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1047 Lines: 24 On Fri, Dec 09, 2016 at 01:50:41PM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote: > > > > We have plenty of customers with 10 year old drivers, where the expertise > > has long left the company. The engineers still around, recompile and make > > tweaks to get things working on the latest RHEL. Verify it passes testing > > and release it. Then they hope to not touch it again for a few years until > > the next RHEL comes along. > > > > Scary, huh? :-) > > Oh yeah my aim here is not to make distro or out of tree module vendors > life harder, actually the opposite. If it turns out modversions really is > the best approach, I'm not in a position to complain about its complexity > because we have Suse and Redhat people maintaining the build and module > systems :) I just want to see if we can do things better. Hi Nick, I think we are in pretty good agreement here. We can do better than modversions. On the flip side, I would hate to see modversions ripped out until we have an alternate path forward as it does get us by for now. :-) Cheers, Don