I spent a good hour or two this afternoon poring over the kernel's module build infrastructure (not daring to look at any .c files, of course), looking at various other module code trying to take them as examples. Something clicked in my head then while looking at include/linux/init.h, which hadn't done before, presumably because I hadn't looked at module examples, and suddenly I understood how things wanted to be compiled as modules and have initcalls/exitcalls registered.
It seems (read: I've been advised) that each subsystem will want to have a pointer to its struct module, so it can keep it "pinned" while the subsystem is loaded. This raises an interesting question: where the hell does the module struct come from? include/linux/module.h has a macro called THIS_MODULE which references extern struct module __this_module. Looking at a few examples, some of them have foo.mod.c files, which all look to have the same struct declaration (with perhaps a few differences, namely in the "depends=" string at the end). However, modules that I found living in kernel/ don't tend to have that, though everything else (use of the initcall macros, etc) was the same. Where does this mystery struct come from? A grep through the standard directories revealed nothing; grepping the whole source tree discovered the file scripts/mod/modpost.c which... generates a header file for module code with the relevant struct information. As in, "buf_printf(b, "struct module __this_module\n");" with surrounding context. Ugh.
I need to learn to start trusting the macros (THIS_MODULE, in this case) that look like complete hax instead of trying to figure out what the hax are.
As a note to myself, the CONFIG_CGROUP option settings live in init/Kconfig, and to enable modularization on an option you need to change 'bool' to 'tristate'.
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