[pvrusb2] New driver snapshot: pvrusb2-mci-20080831

[Mike Isely]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Mark Goldberg wrote:

> I spend most of the day at it, but, not being very good at wound up giving up.
> 
> I did figure out how to get the kernel tree for my running kernel and 
> rebuild that one module against the running kernel instead of as a new 
> kernel and installed it into the running kernel replacing the existing 
> module. I then hard coded the vertical and horizontal offsets to make 
> things center up. Everything works but I ran out of time trying to get 
> the full crop patch to apply to the current version of the module. The 
> patches for my change are simple, just changing a few constants. I 
> think it would be difficult to try to track the status of the module 
> and continuously update the full patch to add the crop controls. I've 
> got a simple script that I run when I update the kernel from the 
> fedora repository that patches a few things and compiles a few modules 
> against that kernel and replaces the standard modules. It only takes a 
> few minutes. If I take the system down for more than that, I get 
> yelled at.

You just need to build another computer to test against :-)

That's actually how I do things here.  I have a "production" system 
running MythTV, but the testing is all done on a workstation which I can 
take down at any time without upsetting anything / anyone.  I actually 
do compilations on a laptop and then rsync the to-be-tested module(s) 
over to the test machine.  This is a nice strategy because it means I 
don't have to restart my entire dev environment every time I panic the 
test machine :-)


> 
> Hopefully the changes will make it into the module, and then into the kernel.

If you'd like to send me the updated changes you are making to the 
module (even if it is hardcoded stuff), I can try to use that to better 
figure out what the "generic" changes should be.  No promises of course, 
since as I said I'm not the subject matter expert on that module.  And 
any final merge-quality patch that would have any chance of getting back 
into the v4l core may yet be a long time in coming.  But I can try.


> 
> Do you know what process is used to reduce the size of the modules? 
> When I compile a module it is several hundred kilobytes. The same 
> modules that come with Fedora are a few tens of kilobytes. Do they use 
> strip to get rid of debug info? I could not find documentation about 
> that anywhere? I don't even know if it is a fedora thing or a generic 
> thing.

There is no "official" process for that which I know of.  Obviously 
distro vendors can do whatever they want.  I generally don't notice this 
because I build my own kernels here.  But as for "what" they do, odds 
are very likely that you are right and that all the debug info gets 
stripped out - that can chop out a lot of stuff from the module.

  -Mike


-- 

Mike Isely
isely @ pobox (dot) com
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