[Devel] Re: [PATCH] fail kernel compilation in case of unresolved symbols (v2)

[Andrew Morton]

On Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:23:49 +0400
Kirill Korotaev <dev at sw.ru> wrote:

> Olaf Hering wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 07, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >>If any module shipped with the kernel has in any configuration 
> >>unresolved symbols that's a bug that should be reported, not ignored.
> > 
> > 
> > Yes, but on request when building the package. Not per default.
> > I probably missed the reason why this is now suddenly a problem.
> It is not that sudden at all. I experienced this problem many times so far
> and working with a build system came to the idea of failing
> builds when there are unresolved symbols.
> 
> I'm pretty sure that having this patch in mainstream
> will make unresolved symbols a rare problem as many of them will be fixed soon.
> So I'm pretty agree with Adrian that modules with unresolved symbols is a bug
> and it MUST be fixed.
> I would be very much interested to hear Andrew opinion on this as
> he probably makes kernels even more often than any of us :)
> 

Am sympathetic to the idea.

Some architectures (eg sparc64) generate large numbers of unresolved module
symbol warnings during an allmodconfig build.  It's not a big problem in
practice - these are subsystems which everyone statically links anyway.

But it does mean that additional work needs to be done if we want to
prevent these allmodconfig builds from erroring out.