support partial text / regex search

[jkldgoefgkljefogeg]

for example https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/net/ipv4/proc.c#L206 , nothing comes up if I search TCPDSACKUndo but LINUX_MIB_TCPDSACKUNDO works

Is there a better way to do this kind of search?

[tleb]

Our current database allows us to do prefix lookup without doing a linear scan. Eg clk_ can give us easily all the clock subsystem definitions. That is why we can provide autocomplete.

We however cannot do suffix queries, eg *_rate returning clk_get_rate & co. The current definitions database is 4.4M entries and 2.8GB. We also have a cache database that only has definition names (not their positions) and that is 273M. This is still pretty massive for a linear scan.

The solution would be a proper search engine with exact trigram matching. This could be implemented. It might be required if/when we add additional language support (see Rust that has namespacing, we might not be able to expect people know the exact namespace for everything).

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Conclusion: we'd like it, but it isn't easy. We might or might not implement it (ourselves). A proof-of-concept would probably be the first step. If anyone is interested, we can talk!