From: Sam Ravnborg The hotcpu_notifier is used to create notifiers to be called later. It really looks like the functions that are registered are only relevant in a HOTPLUG_CPU configuration and the correct fix was to wrap them in an #ifdef / #endif or similar. But for now just tell modpost to silence the warning by annotating the static variable with __refdata. This silences the following warnings in kernel/: WARNING: o-x86_64/kernel/built-in.o(.data+0x960): Section mismatch in reference from the variable profile_cpu_callback_nb.17240 to the function .devinit.text:profile_cpu_callback() WARNING: o-x86_64/kernel/built-in.o(.data+0x3fa0): Section mismatch in reference from the variable workqueue_cpu_callback_nb.14663 to the function .devinit.text:workqueue_cpu_callback() WARNING: o-x86_64/kernel/built-in.o(.data+0xe280): Section mismatch in reference from the variable relay_hotcpu_callback_nb.19247 to the function .cpuinit.text:relay_hotcpu_callback() Additional warnings are silenced with this change but they are left put. This patch is just a workaround for the bad practice to use __cpuinit to annotate code solely used for HOTPLUG_CPU. Signed-off-by: Sam Ravnborg Cc: Gautham R Shenoy Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton --- include/linux/cpu.h | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff -puN include/linux/cpu.h~cpu-silence-section-mismatch-warnings-for-hotcpu-notifies include/linux/cpu.h --- a/include/linux/cpu.h~cpu-silence-section-mismatch-warnings-for-hotcpu-notifies +++ a/include/linux/cpu.h @@ -109,7 +109,7 @@ static inline void cpuhotplug_mutex_unlo extern void get_online_cpus(void); extern void put_online_cpus(void); #define hotcpu_notifier(fn, pri) { \ - static struct notifier_block fn##_nb = \ + static struct notifier_block fn##_nb __refdata = \ { .notifier_call = fn, .priority = pri }; \ register_cpu_notifier(&fn##_nb); \ } _