As BenH said the other day, it is an "accident" that prom_init.o is
linked with the rest of the kernel. The truth is a little more
subtle, prom_init isn't truly bootloader, it does access kernel data
in a few places.
What we can do is discourage people from adding new code that accesses
data outside of prom_init. And hence this patch; from the script:
# This script checks prom_init.o to see what external symbols it
# is using, if it finds symbols not in the whitelist it returns
# an error. The point of this is to discourage people from
# intentionally or accidentally adding new code to prom_init.c
# which has side effects on other parts of the kernel.
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <michael@ellerman.id.au>
Acked-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Michael Ellerman