On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 11:41:18AM +0200, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote: [snip]
This patch seems to have been met with a lot of responses in the tone> of "this is not an appealing solution".
Personally, having generic helpers for putting blobs into /proc files (like config.gz) sound appealing. But I'm not sure whether doing that w/ kernel headers this way is a good solution. Actually, I'm even not sure whether raw kernel headers are at all are a good way. (can't we use compiler-generated debug info ?)
We can't use compiler generated debug info for this.
As discussed previously here, eBPF tools need kernel headers, DWARF and compiler debug information wont help: https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/3/11/1358 https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/3/11/1363
Usually what we do at times like this is that we say "Yeah, this is a> problem that should be solved, but this solution doesn't seem to be>
the right one and we would need to maintain it forever as part of the> ABI. Let's wait until a better solution is found." With time,> sometimes a better solution becomes obvious, or circumstances change> enough to allow for some different approach, or someone has a new idea> from a different perspective that solves the same problem. ACK. For now, this is an Android-only debug tool, just needed there because of it's unusual partitioning/deployment mechanisms - on usual GNU/Linux distros, we just have the kheaders in the file system. (and even on my small embedded devices, I either run the DUTs via NFS, 9P2k, initrd, etc or just deploy kernel and headers into the filesystem)
As Android already is in it's own universe, why can't that stuff remain incubated there, until we have more field experience w/ it and more time to rethink the whole idea very carefully ?
Well, we follow mostly an upstream first process.
The patch is pretty small, so it's trivial cherry-pick, in case somebody outside Android universe wants to use it.
It could break very easily if things upstream change in some way, and adds a lot of maintenance burden, besides I don't see a good reason it should not be upstreamed tbh.
thanks,
- Joel