[RFC/PATCH 00/14] split exception table content out of module.h into extable.h

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 8:42 PM, Paul Gortmaker
<paul.gortmaker at windriver.com> wrote:
>
> While doing an audit looking for unnecessary instances of module.h
> inclusion across arch/x86/ I found a significant number of includes
> of module.h were for things like search_exception_table and friends.
>
> For historical reasons (i.e. pre-git) the exception table stuff was
> buried in the middle of the module.h file.  So we have core kernel
> files that are completely non-modular (both arch specific and arch
> independent) that are just including module.h for this.
>
> The converse is also true, in that conventional drivers, be they for
> filesystems or actual hardware peripherals or similar, do not
> normally care about the exception tables.
>
> Here we fork the exception table content [...]

This looks to be the right thing to do as far as I can tell. I'm not
sure how big of a problem the extable stuff is (we definitely have
much bigger unnecessary include files that cause a lot more problems),
but it seems like a reasonable cleanup.

              Linus