Re: New (now current development process)

[Russell King <rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk>]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 04:13:22PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > Are you sure these kernels are feature-equivalent?
> 
> They may not be feature-equivalent in reality, but it's hard to generate 
> something that has the features (or lack there-of) of old kernels these 
> days. Which is problematic.
> 
> But some of it is likely also compilers. gcc does insane padding in many 
> cases these days. 
> 
> And a lot of it is us just being bloated. Argh.

Which is one of the reasons I've started working on fixing up the
platform device/driver stuff to conform to the "usual" method,
with the view to killing off _all_ the function pointers in
struct device_driver.

Most bus types wrap struct device_driver, and then provide their own
function pointers which pass their bus-type specific device structure.
This does two things: 1. it centralises the conversion from struct
device to struct whatever_device, and 2. improves typechecking.

However, once the use of the function pointers in struct device_driver
have been eliminated, we can be sure of reclaiming at least 20 bytes
per device driver, maybe more if GCC does insane padding.

-- 
Russell King
 Linux kernel    2.6 ARM Linux   - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
 maintainer of:  2.6 Serial core
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