Question

Noticed in our makefiles EXPORT_SYMTAB is used as described in here.

Is it still relevant to 2.6 and above kernels?
I can not find reference what it’s current status, but can’t find it in LXR.

Answer 1

The EXPORT_SYMTAB name per se seems to be gone once and for all since 2.6 kernels. However, the related macro EXPORT_SYMTAB_STROPS seems to have still a small relevance for what concerns SPARC architectures as explained here. Quoting directly from the mailing list:

> given that EXPORT_SYMTAB was removed from the kernel tree quite some
> time back, is this related macro still doing anything useful? just
> asking.

It’s only used by sparc so that it can export symbols like memcpy(),
memset() et al. properly

Without this ifdef protection while building ksyms.c, string*.h will
define these functions as macros, and that makes things like:

EXPORT_SYMBOL(memcpy)

and similar not work because memcpy will macro expand and thus break
the build with syntax errors.

EXPORT_SYMTAB_STROPS macros are still present in 3.4.9 kernel.

#> find . \( -name '*.c' -o -name '*.h' \) -exec grep -inH EXPORT_SYMTAB {} \;
./arch/sparc/lib/ksyms.c:6:#define EXPORT_SYMTAB_STROPS
./arch/sparc/include/asm/string_64.h:18:#ifndef EXPORT_SYMTAB_STROPS
./arch/sparc/include/asm/string_64.h:58:#endif /* !EXPORT_SYMTAB_STROPS */
./arch/sparc/include/asm/string_32.h:20:#ifndef EXPORT_SYMTAB_STROPS
./arch/sparc/include/asm/string_32.h:127:#endif /* !EXPORT_SYMTAB_STROPS */