modpost warning question

[Sam Ravnborg]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 06:08:03PM +0800, chengong wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-07-25 at 09:27 +0200, Sam Ravnborg wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 02:14:12AM -0500, Kumar Gala wrote:
> > > I'm seeing the following warning:
> > > 
> > > WARNING: vmlinux.o(.init.text+0x1acdc): Section mismatch: reference to
> > > .exit.text:gfar_mdio_exit (between 'gfar_init' and 'gfar_mdio_init')
> > > 
> > > I don't understand why its not ok to access .exit.text from .init.text
> > 
> > Several architectures discards .exit.text in the final linker
> > script (arch/$(ARCH)/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S
> > 
> > So any references to .exit.text will when a module is build-in result
> > in a linker error because ld will flag it as an error when we reference
> > a symbol in a discarded section.
> But why? Just make kernel size smaller?
Yes - that the whole goal of init/exit sections.

> > 
> > For the popular architectures (i386,x86_64) we discard .exit.text at
> > runtime so here we do not see the error from ld (sadly).
> >From which version? On my machine I have seen the same problem when
> building i386 target with the version 2.6.21.
modpost has started to warn about it. I assume you did not see link errors.

	Sam