3a2429e1fa
The 'define' ... 'endef' directive is useful to confine a series of
shell commands into a single macro:
define foo
[action1]
[action2]
[action3]
endif
Each action is executed in a separate subshell.
However, rule_cc_o_c and rule_as_o_S in scripts/Makefile.build are
written as follows (with a trailing semicolon in each cmd_*):
define rule_cc_o_c
[action1] ; \
[action2] ; \
[action3] ;
endef
All shell commands are concatenated with '; \' so that it looks like
a single command from the Makefile point of view. This does not
exploit the benefits of 'define' ... 'endef' form because a single
shell command can be more simply written, like this:
rule_cc_o_c = \
[action1] ; \
[action2] ; \
[action3] ;
I guess the intention for the command concatenation was to let the
'@set -e' in if_changed_rule cover all the commands.
We can improve the readability by moving '@set -e' to the 'cmd' macro.
The combo of $(call echo-cmd,*) $(cmd_*) in rule_cc_o_c and rule_as_o_S
have been replaced with $(call cmd,*). The trailing back-slashes have
been removed.
Here is a note about the performance: the commands in rule_cc_o_c and
rule_as_o_S were previously executed all together in a single subshell,
but now each line in a separate subshell. This means Make will spawn
extra subshells [1]. I measured the build performance for
x86_64_defconfig + CONFIG_MODVERSIONS + CONFIG_TRIM_UNUSED_KSYMS
and I saw slight performance regression, but I believe code readability
and maintainability wins.
[1] Precisely, GNU Make may optimize this by executing the command
directly instead of forking a subshell, if no shell special
characters are found in the command line and omitting the subshell
will not change the behavior.
Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <yamada.masahiro@socionext.com>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.