Re: [PATCH PREVIEW RFC 0/6] Add support for boot-time caching

On 9/23/25 09:23, acampanella-thegoodpenguin wrote:
> This patch series provides a simple key-value cache for storing boot-time
> configuration data. The goal is to allow kernel components and drivers to
> cache time-consuming-to-compute values during boot, enabling faster
> subsequent boots by avoiding redundant initialization work.

Does the vmlinux build use --gc-sections yet so this sort of thing can 
drop out when it's not needed? (Marking it _init still eats early boot 
and flash space.)

The kernel build is a giant complicated thing using linker scripts so I 
don't want to blindly throw -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections in there 
but this plumbing strikes me as something that will penalize systems 
that _don't_ calculate expensive things and refer to them multiple times 
(or would rather eat the CPU than eat the RAM to do it). And adding more 
kconfig nonsense to have the build manually pull it in seems silly when 
the tools have been able to do this automatically for over 20 years...

Rob