Commit c3a6cf19 ("export: avoid code duplication in
include/linux/export.h") refactors export.h quite nicely, but introduces
a slight increase in memory usage due to using the empty string ""
instead of NULL to indicate that an exported symbol has no namespace. As
mentioned in that commit, this meant an increase of 1 byte per exported
symbol without a namespace. For example, if a kernel configuration has
about 10k exported symbols, this would mean that the size of
__ksymtab_strings would increase by roughly 10kB.

We can alleviate this situation by utilizing the SHF_MERGE and
SHF_STRING section flags. SHF_MERGE|SHF_STRING indicate to the linker
that the data in the section are null-terminated strings that can be
merged to eliminate duplication. More specifically, from the binutils
documentation - "for sections with both M and S, a string which is a
suffix of a larger string is considered a duplicate. Thus "def" will be
merged with "abcdef"; A reference to the first "def" will be changed to
a reference to "abcdef"+3". Thus, all the empty strings would be merged
as well as any strings that can be merged according to the cited method
above. For example, "memset" and "__memset" would be merged to just
"__memset" in __ksymtab_strings.

As of v5.4-rc5, the following statistics were gathered with x86
defconfig with approximately 10.7k exported symbols.

Size of __ksymtab_strings in vmlinux:
-------------------------------------
v5.4-rc5: 213834 bytes
v5.4-rc5 with commit c3a6cf19: 224455 bytes
v5.4-rc5 with this patch: 205759 bytes

So, we already see memory savings of ~8kB compared to vanilla -rc5 and
savings of nearly 18.7kB compared to -rc5 with commit c3a6cf19 on top.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, strings will not get deduplicated for
kernel modules, as ld does not do the deduplication for
SHF_MERGE|SHF_STRINGS sections for relocatable files (ld -r), which
kernel modules are. A patch for ld is currently being worked on to
hopefully allow for string deduplication in relocatable files in the
future.
Suggested-by: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Reviewed-by: Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Matthias Maennich <maennich@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Jessica Yu <jeyu@kernel.org>