vmlinux.lds: add comments for global variables and clean up useless declarations

The original goal of this patchset is to fix the bug reported by
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53501 Now it has also been
expanded to reduce common code used by memory initializion.

Patch 1-7:
	1) add comments for global variables exported by vmlinux.lds
	2) normalize global variables exported by vmlinux.lds
Patch 8:
	Introduce helper functions mem_init_print_info() and
	get_num_physpages()
Patch 9:
	Avoid using global variable num_physpages at runtime
Patch 10:
	Don't update num_physpages in memory_hotplug.c
Patch 11-40:
	Modify arch mm initialization code to:
	1) Simplify mem_init() by using mem_init_print_info()
	2) Prepare for killing global variable num_physpages
Patch 41:
	Kill the global variable num_physpages

With all patches applied, mem_init(), free_initmem(), free_initrd_mem()
could be as simple as below.  This patch series has reduced about 1.2K
lines of code in total.

#ifndef CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM
void __init
mem_init(void)
{
	max_mapnr = max_low_pfn;
	free_all_bootmem();
	high_memory = (void *) __va(max_low_pfn * PAGE_SIZE);

	mem_init_print_info(NULL);
}
#endif /* CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM */

void
free_initmem(void)
{
	free_initmem_default(-1);
}

#ifdef CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD
void
free_initrd_mem(unsigned long start, unsigned long end)
{
	free_reserved_area(start, end, -1, "initrd");
}
#endif

Due to hardware resource limitations, I have only tested this on x86_64.
And the messages reported on an x86_64 system are:

Log message before applying patches:
Memory: 7745676k/8910848k available (6934k kernel code, 836024k absent, 329148k reserved, 6343k data, 1012k init)

Log message after applying patches:
Memory: 7744624K/8074824K available (6969K kernel code, 1011K data, 2828K rodata, 1016K init, 9640K bss, 330200K reserved)

Great thanks to Vineet Gupta for testing on ARC.

This patch:

Document global variables exported from vmlinux.lds.

1) Add comments about usage guidelines for global variables exported
   from vmlinux.lds.S.
2) Remove unused __initdata_begin[] and __initdata_end[].

Signed-off-by: Jiang Liu <jiang.liu@huawei.com>
Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Vineet Gupta <vgupta@synopsys.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>

diff --git a/include/asm-generic/sections.h b/include/asm-generic/sections.h
index c1a1216e29ced8ad92dac7c089991e7bf97bd2c3..f1a24b5c3b906ef91804bca4f6f56b4158d93aca 100644 (file)
--- a/include/asm-generic/sections.h
+++ b/include/asm-generic/sections.h
@@ -3,6 +3,26 @@
 
 /* References to section boundaries */
 
+/*
+ * Usage guidelines:
+ * _text, _data: architecture specific, don't use them in arch-independent code
+ * [_stext, _etext]: contains .text.* sections, may also contain .rodata.*
+ *                   and/or .init.* sections
+ * [_sdata, _edata]: contains .data.* sections, may also contain .rodata.*
+ *                   and/or .init.* sections.
+ * [__start_rodata, __end_rodata]: contains .rodata.* sections
+ * [__init_begin, __init_end]: contains .init.* sections, but .init.text.*
+ *                   may be out of this range on some architectures.
+ * [_sinittext, _einittext]: contains .init.text.* sections
+ * [__bss_start, __bss_stop]: contains BSS sections
+ *
+ * Following global variables are optional and may be unavailable on some
+ * architectures and/or kernel configurations.
+ *     _text, _data
+ *     __kprobes_text_start, __kprobes_text_end
+ *     __entry_text_start, __entry_text_end
+ *     __ctors_start, __ctors_end
+ */
 extern char _text[], _stext[], _etext[];
 extern char _data[], _sdata[], _edata[];
 extern char __bss_start[], __bss_stop[];
@@ -12,7 +32,6 @@ extern char _end[];
 extern char __per_cpu_load[], __per_cpu_start[], __per_cpu_end[];
 extern char __kprobes_text_start[], __kprobes_text_end[];
 extern char __entry_text_start[], __entry_text_end[];
-extern char __initdata_begin[], __initdata_end[];
 extern char __start_rodata[], __end_rodata[];
 
 /* Start and end of .ctors section - used for constructor calls. */