Installed kernel modules are much larger than NV stock L4T

[CHNtentes]

Hi. I found out that the kernel modules installed in my image are much larger than NV stock ones.

NVL4T.txt
yocto.txt

NV L4T kernel modules only take up ~88MB space, while mine take up ~2.0GB.
The .ko files with the same name are much larger now. (6.3MB compared to 157KB)

Is there any config affecting this?

[madisongh]

I hadn't noticed this before, but the problem is that starting with JetPack 5, NVIDIA changed the default kernel config to set CONFIG_MODULE_SIG and CONFIG_MODULE_SIG_ALL. The latter is causing kernel modules to get signed as part of the build process (specifically, during the do_install task), and so the normal debug info stripping that would happen during packaging gets skipped (because that would invalidate the signature).

There are a couple of ways this can be fixed. I'm leaning towards disabling CONFIG_MODULE_SIG_ALL in our builds by default. In the meantime, you could do this yourself via a bbappend by adding a config fragment to the SRC_URI that says # CONFIG_MODULE_SIG_ALL is not set.

[CHNtentes]

I tried adding a .cfg which contains # CONFIG_MODULE_SIG_ALL is not set, then rebuilt the kernel. However, the modules were still about 2.0GB in size. I also tried # CONFIG_MODULE_SIG is not set, but still didn't work.
At last, I added both lines into arch/arm64/configs/defconfig, still nothing changed.

[madisongh]

Well, I have this change queued up in a pending PR (see 4b9624f), and it's working for me. The resulting kernel configuration is omitting that setting, and the do_package task during the kernel build is showing the modules getting stripped. The .ko files are significantly smaller, as expected.

[CHNtentes]

I checked once again and it did work. The problem was that I looked in kernel recipe's image dir, not final rootfs. The .ko files got smaller when installed.