Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Bloatwatch 2.6.28-rc1: i8042 DMI lookup tables | From | Matt Mackall <> | Date | Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:13:22 -0500 |
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On Sat, 2008-10-25 at 00:15 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote: > On Fri, 24 Oct 2008, Matt Mackall wrote: > > > We've added 12k of new initdata to allnoconfig builds for i8042 DMI > > lookup tables: > > > > http://www.selenic.com/bloatwatch/?cmd=compare;v1=2.6.27;v2=2.6.28-rc1;part=/built-in/drivers > > > > It looks like each table entry is > 320 bytes as we reserve four 80-byte > > slots in each for DMI match strings. > > Umm, and what is the actual problem with that, really?
The actual problem is that if the kernel grows by 12k every time a developer says "what's the big deal?" the kernel will become very large indeed.
> OK, we can remove it from .init, but then it will be rotting in memory > forever, which is quite sub-optimal, when this kind of DMI information is > needed only during initialization.
I wasn't complaining that they were in init, but rather that they were 12k. For something like 37 entries. The entry size is ridiculous and looks to have grown by a factor of 10 since 2.6.27. What, as they say, is up with that?
It looks like David Woodhouse is to blame:
commit d945b697d0eea5a811ec299c5f1a25889bb0242b Automatic MODULE_ALIAS() for DMI match tables.
This is probably also responsible for most of the growth in x86 I mentioned elsewhere, so it's about 25-30k damage in total. David?
-- Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.
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