Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Bloatwatch 2.6.28-rc1: i8042 DMI lookup tables | From | David Woodhouse <> | Date | Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:14:52 +0100 |
| |
On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 18:13 -0500, Matt Mackall wrote: > 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?
There's an assessment of this in the commit comment which you omitted.
It compresses well, and it's __initdata. So it takes up very little space in the bzImage, and is dropped fairly quickly during boot. So the amount of time it's _actually_ taking up any noticeable amount of memory is really quite small.
But if someone wants to extend modpost so that it can handle relocations and we can use string _pointers_ in the dmi tables, that would be good.
-- David Woodhouse Open Source Technology Centre David.Woodhouse@intel.com Intel Corporation
| |