• Masahiro Yamada's avatar
    kbuild: do not read $(KBUILD_EXTMOD)/Module.symvers · 39808e45
    Masahiro Yamada authored
    Since commit 040fcc81 ("kbuild: improved modversioning support for
    external modules"), the external module build reads Module.symvers in
    the directory of the module itself, then dumps symbols back into it.
    It accumulates stale symbols in the file when you build an external
    module incrementally.
    
    The idea behind it was, as the commit log explained, you can copy
    Modules.symvers from one module to another when you need to pass symbol
    information between two modules. However, the manual copy of the file
    sounds questionable to me, and containing stale symbols is a downside.
    
    Some time later, commit 0d96fb20 ("kbuild: Add new Kbuild variable
    KBUILD_EXTRA_SYMBOLS") introduced a saner approach.
    
    So, this commit removes the former one. Going forward, the external
    module build dumps symbols into Module.symvers to be carried via
    KBUILD_EXTRA_SYMBOLS, but never reads it automatically.
    
    With the -I option removed, there is no one to set the external_module
    flag unless KBUILD_EXTRA_SYMBOLS is passed. Now the -i option does it
    instead.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMasahiro Yamada <yamada.masahiro@socionext.com>
    39808e45
modules.rst 17.5 KB