Re: sorting of exports breaks modpost's GPL checking

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@novell.com>]

>>> On 07.07.11 at 03:03, Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> wrote:
> On Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:47:55 +0100, "Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@novell.com> wrote:
>> >>> On 05.07.11 at 11:36, Alessio Igor Bogani <abogani@kernel.org> wrote:
>> > Dear Mr. Beulich,
>> > 
>> > 2011/7/4 Jan Beulich <JBeulich@novell.com>:
>> >> Is it known (and being worked on) that exported symbols residing
>> >> themselves in modules are no longer properly handled by modpost,
>> >> due to the .o files to be linked into .ko (other than vmlinux and the
>> >> .ko files) still carrying the ___ksymtab*+<symbol> sections?
>> >>
>> >> If not - what are the thoughts to resolve this?
>> > [...]
>> > 
>> > Could you tell me how reproduce the problem?
>> 
>> Just look at Modules.symvers - all the symbols coming from modules
>> will be tagged "(unknown)" rather than EXPORT_SYMBOL,
>> EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL, etc.
>> 
>> As to reproducing the actual bad behavior - creating a non-GPL
>> module that consumes a GPL-only export should be all you need.
>> 
>> Jan
> 
> We could just drop this detection.  It's a courtesy, after all: the gpl
> stuff is enforced at runtime.
> 
> Thoughts?

Especially for the purpose of distros I think it is quite valuable to
know at build time whether there's any inconsistency that would
result in runtime problems (and you certainly don't expect that
testing would manage to cover each and every obscure module).

Jan

> Rusty.