Many (very many) seq files in net/ allocate some private data to use it later (mostly for iteration state). All this code was obviously get using copy-paste method, so move it into one place.
Almost all of these places either set this private to 0, or keep uninitialized. Some places, however, pre-initialize this area, but there are few of them. The seq_open_private() call just opens the seq file with allocated and set to zero area. The __seq_open_private() call makes the same, but returns the allocated memory to the called to be initialized later. I didn't measure how much of the .text section this saves, but I suspect a lot of :) As far as the code is concerned, this set saves ~450 lines. Such thing may be useful for any subsystem, but I found this mostly in the networking code and fixed only it (for a while). Signed-off-by: Pavel Emelyanov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
