[PATCH v1 00/10] Remove weak function declarations

From: Bjorn Helgaas
Date: Wed Oct 15 2014 - 13:05:49 EST


A common usage of "weak" is for a default implementation of a function.
An architecture that needs something different can supply a non-weak
("strong") implementation, with the expectation that the linker will select
the strong version and discard the weak default version.

We have a few function declarations in header files annotated as "weak".
That causes every *every* definition to be marked "weak", which means there
is no strong version at all. In this case, the linker selects one of the
weak versions based on link order. I don't think this is what we want.

These patches remove almost all the weak annotations from header files
(MIPS still uses it for get_c0_compare_int(), apparently relying on the
fact that a weak symbol need not be defined at all). In most cases, the
default implementation was already marked weak at the definition. When it
wasn't, I added that.

It might be simplest if I ask Linus to pull these all as a group from my
branch [1]. I'll look for acks from the following people. If I don't see
an ack, I'll drop the patch and you can take it yourself or ignore it as
you wish.

Eric: audit
Thomas, Ingo, or Peter: x86
Ralf: MIPS
John or Thomas: clocksource
Jason: kgdb
Ingo: uprobes
Andrew: vmcore, memory-hotplug

I don't know whether these fix any actual bugs. We *did* have a bug like
this on MIPS a while ago (10629d711ed7 ("PCI: Remove __weak annotation from
pcibios_get_phb_of_node decl")), so it's possible that they do fix
something.

[1] https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/helgaas/pci.git/log/?h=remove-weak-function-declarations

---

Bjorn Helgaas (10):
audit: Remove "weak" from audit_classify_compat_syscall() declaration
x86, intel-mid: Remove "weak" from function declarations
MIPS: CPC: Make mips_cpc_phys_base() static
MIPS: Remove "weak" from platform_maar_init() declaration
MIPS: MT: Move "weak" from vpe_run() declaration to definition
clocksource: Remove "weak" from clocksource_default_clock() declaration
vmcore: Remove "weak" from function declarations
kgdb: Remove "weak" from kgdb_arch_pc() declaration
memory-hotplug: Remove "weak" from memory_block_size_bytes() declaration
uprobes: Remove "weak" from function declarations


arch/mips/include/asm/maar.h | 2 +-
arch/mips/include/asm/mips-cpc.h | 10 ----------
arch/mips/include/asm/vpe.h | 2 +-
arch/mips/kernel/mips-cpc.c | 2 +-
arch/mips/kernel/vpe-mt.c | 2 +-
arch/x86/platform/intel-mid/intel_mid_weak_decls.h | 7 +++----
include/linux/audit.h | 2 +-
include/linux/clocksource.h | 2 +-
include/linux/crash_dump.h | 15 +++++++--------
include/linux/kgdb.h | 2 +-
include/linux/memory.h | 2 +-
include/linux/uprobes.h | 14 +++++++-------
12 files changed, 25 insertions(+), 37 deletions(-)
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