From 898490c010b5d2e499e03b7e815fc214209ac583 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Alexey Gladkov Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2019 18:11:14 +0200 Subject: moduleparam: Save information about built-in modules in separate file Problem: When a kernel module is compiled as a separate module, some important information about the kernel module is available via .modinfo section of the module. In contrast, when the kernel module is compiled into the kernel, that information is not available. Information about built-in modules is necessary in the following cases: 1. When it is necessary to find out what additional parameters can be passed to the kernel at boot time. 2. When you need to know which module names and their aliases are in the kernel. This is very useful for creating an initrd image. Proposal: The proposed patch does not remove .modinfo section with module information from the vmlinux at the build time and saves it into a separate file after kernel linking. So, the kernel does not increase in size and no additional information remains in it. Information is stored in the same format as in the separate modules (null-terminated string array). Because the .modinfo section is already exported with a separate modules, we are not creating a new API. It can be easily read in the userspace: $ tr '\0' '\n' < modules.builtin.modinfo ext4.softdep=pre: crc32c ext4.license=GPL ext4.description=Fourth Extended Filesystem ext4.author=Remy Card, Stephen Tweedie, Andrew Morton, Andreas Dilger, Theodore Ts'o and others ext4.alias=fs-ext4 ext4.alias=ext3 ext4.alias=fs-ext3 ext4.alias=ext2 ext4.alias=fs-ext2 md_mod.alias=block-major-9-* md_mod.alias=md md_mod.description=MD RAID framework md_mod.license=GPL md_mod.parmtype=create_on_open:bool md_mod.parmtype=start_dirty_degraded:int ... Co-Developed-by: Gleb Fotengauer-Malinovskiy Signed-off-by: Gleb Fotengauer-Malinovskiy Signed-off-by: Alexey Gladkov Acked-by: Jessica Yu Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada --- Documentation/dontdiff | 1 + Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.txt | 5 +++++ 2 files changed, 6 insertions(+) (limited to 'Documentation') diff --git a/Documentation/dontdiff b/Documentation/dontdiff index ef25a066d952..512fa0239ebf 100644 --- a/Documentation/dontdiff +++ b/Documentation/dontdiff @@ -178,6 +178,7 @@ mktables mktree modpost modules.builtin +modules.builtin.modinfo modules.order modversions.h* nconf diff --git a/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.txt b/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.txt index 8a3830b39c7d..9c230ea71963 100644 --- a/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.txt +++ b/Documentation/kbuild/kbuild.txt @@ -11,6 +11,11 @@ modules.builtin This file lists all modules that are built into the kernel. This is used by modprobe to not fail when trying to load something builtin. +modules.builtin.modinfo +-------------------------------------------------- +This file contains modinfo from all modules that are built into the kernel. +Unlike modinfo of a separate module, all fields are prefixed with module name. + Environment variables -- cgit v1.2.3