Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

We have several cases in syscalltrack, where due to bad design or circumstances, when you change one file (e.g. the syscall stub code template files) you have to change accordingly another file (e.g. the “special syscalls” files). I’m reading an interview with Rusty Russell on kerneltrap, where Rusty describes how he implemented a MODULE_VERSION macro:

“JA: What will the MODULE_VERSION macro do?

Rusty Russell: Oh, that reminds me, I have to test that. Thanks.

OK, it’s sent. The patch allows a module author to add a version tag to their module, which the modern modinfo can extract. This is a one-liner. But I wanted to catch the (common) case where a change has been made to a driver by someone else, and the version number not modified. So I added a step to the build where every module with a version would have a checksum of the source file contents appended. It’s not perfect, but it gives *some* simple protection, and driver authors can always ignore it.

Patch can be found in my patch collection, or once it’s applied, in you will be able to find it here.”

I wonder if we can use something similar in syscalltrack. Even better would be to remove those nasty dependencies.