Linux Kernel Daily: Breaking Up the Device ID Header
Linus merged Uwe Kleine-König's split of the massive mod_devicetable.h header into per-subsystem files, a maintainability change touching a huge swath of the tree, alongside a routine batch of ATA driver fixes.
Duration: PT2M21S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Linux Kernel Daily.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Linux Kernel Daily
- Published: 2026-07-03T14:07:09Z
- Audio duration: PT2M21S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good day, and welcome to Linux Kernel Daily for July 3rd, 2026.
Today's headline story is a header file diet, and it's the kind of change that quietly makes every future kernel build faster and every future patch safer.
For years, a single header, mod_devicetable dot h, has been pulled into nearly every driver in the tree. Uwe Kleine-König's numbers, cited in his cover letter, are stark: in an x86-64 all-modconfig build, over seventeen thousand object files were touching that one header, even though most drivers only need one or…
The fix, merged by Linus in commit d2c9a99, splits that monolith into per-subsystem headers under a new device-id directory. The first commit, ad428f5, does the actual split. The next two, 995832b and ecca1d6, go through and replace the old blanket include with the specific headers each file actually needs, across…
The fallout from tightening those includes is the second theme: a string of small, targeted fixes making sure code that relied on the old header transitively including something else still compiles. We saw this in parisc, where an explicit include of the compiler header was needed for a basic macro like "unlikely"…
Separately, Damien Le Moal's ATA…
Nearby episodes from Linux Kernel Daily
- Weekly Recap - Timer Infrastructure Overhaul
- VFS Infrastructure Overhaul and Performance Improvements
- Subsystem Fixes and Maintainer Transition
- Memory Safety and Reference Counting Fixes
- Critical Memory Safety and Performance Fixes
- Release Candidate Fixes and Namespace Security
- Memory Safety and Validation Fixes
- Hyper-V Stability and Build Fixes