Subject: A word of warning...

From: Jeff Sutherland <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2000 15:13:04 -0400

A word of warning to those attempting to reduce the size of their occupied
disk space:

I've just spent 3 days chasing down a problem with PCMCIA network drivers on
SA1110, finally figured it out.  How many of you are using 'arm-linux-strip'
to reduce the size of your object modules?  Well, I got burned using
'--strip-unneeded' on a module.  Funny, the stripped module would run on a
2.3.99pre* kernel, but building the exact same source code and using the
same strip parameters caused it to not work in any of the 2.4.0-test1-X-X
kernels. ????  The 'busybox' version of insmod would load it fine.  lsmod
would show it loaded.  Its symbols showed up in /proc/ksyms.  BUT, the
initialization code at the end of pcnet_cs WOULD NOT BE EXECUTED.  Obviously
--strip-unneeded took out something that WAS needed.  Other stripped modules
(8390.o) seem to load and work fine.  I'll have to experiment with some of
the other 'strip' options to see which ones work, if any.  I wonder what
changed in the kernel to cause this behaviour?  BTW it's probably something
in pcnet_cs.c anyway, not the kernel- you know, one of those latent bugs
that finally got exposed.  At least I'll be able to sleep tonight...

Regards,
//Jeff

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