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--- Chase Venters <chase.venters@clientec.com> wrote: > On Monday 23 October 2006 00:40, Giridhar Pemmasani wrote: > > It seems that the kernel module loader taints ndiswrapper module as > > proprietary, but it is not - it is fully GPL: see > > http://directory.fsf.org/sysadmin/hookup/ndiswrapper.html > > Indeed. 'ndiswrapper' is intentionally tainted by kernel/module.c because > it > is used to load and run unknown binary / proprietary code in kernel-space. > If > this unknown binary / proprietary code were to contain a bug (which all > code > of that complexity tends to), it might write to memory it doesn't own, or > coerce a device to do so on its behalf, making a kernel crash dump analysis > > into a wild goose chase (hence the reason for kernel taint). Yes, I agree on the purpose of tainting the kernel. > > Note that when a driver is loaded, ndiswrapper does taint the kernel (to > be > > more accurate, it should check if the driver being loaded is GPL or not, > > but that is not done). > > Are you saying ndiswrapper voluntarily calls add_taint() whenever it loads > an > NDIS driver? Exactly - the loader within ndiswrapper taints kernel versions 2.6.10 and newer (older kernels don't have a way of tainting the kernel). The code is in loader.c in ndiswrapper. > Are there even any examples of GPL-licensed NDIS drivers? I don't remember off hand, but sometime back there was discussion on related topic of weather ndiswrapper should be in debian-main or not, and someone pointed out a GPL ndis driver. (BTW, after much discussion on debian devel list, the developers agreed that ndiswrapper belongs in debian-main.) Giri __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ | ||||||||||||
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