Re: Remove unused exports and save 98Kb of kernel size

From: Valerie Henson
Date: Thu Apr 06 2006 - 20:42:39 EST


On Mon, Apr 03, 2006 at 04:10:27PM +0200, J?rn Engel wrote:
> On Sat, 1 April 2006 23:05:45 +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> >
> > I've made a patch to remove all EXPORT_SYMBOL's that aren't used in the
> > kernel; it's too big for the list so it can be found at
> >
> > http://www.kernelmorons.org/unexport.patch
> >
> > -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 34476416 Apr 1 21:59 vmlinux.before
> > -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 34378112 Apr 1 22:48 vmlinux.after
> >
> > As you can see this saves 98Kb kernel size... that's not peanuts.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Is there a reason that you always leave the newline instead of
> removing it as well? Looks script-generated, so it should be a simple
> change for the script to remove the newline as well.

Because it wasn't worth fixing for a silly April Fool's joke? :)

> On Sat, 1 April 2006 23:05:45 +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
^^^^^^^
> > http://www.kernelmorons.org/unexport.patch
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Of course, there's a serious side to this patch. Who knows how many
of these exported symbols are actually used? I can imagine a config
option to turn off these symbols which is shipped as on by default for
a few weeks, in order to flush out people who are actually using these
symbols.

-VAL
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