Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:19:38 +0100 | | From | Daniel Lezcano <> | | Subject | Re: namespace support requires network modules to say "GPL" |
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Daniel Lezcano wrote: > Ben Greear wrote: >> Eric W. Biederman wrote: >>> Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash.net> writes: >>> >>> >>>> Ben Greear wrote: >>>> >>>>> I have a binary module that uses dev_get_by_name...it's sort of a >>>>> bridge-like >>>>> thing and >>>>> needs user-space to tell it which device to listen for packets on... >>>>> >>>>> This code doesn't need or care about name-spaces, so I don't see >>>>> how it could >>>>> really >>>>> be infringing on the author's code (any worse than loading a binary >>>>> driver >>>>> into the kernel >>>>> ever does). >>>>> >>> >>> Regardless of infringement it is incompatible with a complete network >>> namespace implementation. Further it sounds like the module you are >>> describing defines a kernel ABI without being merged and hopes that >>> ABI will still be supportable in the future. Honestly I think doing so >>> is horrible code maintenance policy. >>> >> I don't mind if the ABI changes, so long as I can still use something >> similar. >> >> The namespace logic is interesting to me in general, but at this point >> I can't think of a way that >> it actually helps this particular module. All I really need is a way >> to grab every frame >> from eth0 and then transmit it to eth1. I'm currently doing this by >> finding the netdevice >> and registering a raw-packet protocol (ie, like tcpdump would do). At >> least up to 2.6.23, >> this does not require any hacks to the kernel and uses only non GPL >> exported symbols. >> >> Based on my understanding of the namespace logic, if I never add any >> namespaces, >> the general network layout should look similar to how it does today, >> so I should have >> no logical problem with my module. >> >>> Once things are largely complete it makes sense to argue with out of >>> tree module authors that because they don't have network namespace >>> support in their modules, their modules are broken. >> Does this imply that every module that accesses the network code >> *must* become >> GPL simply because it must interact with namespace logic that is >> exported as GPL only symbols? > > That's right, with init_net's EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL and dev_get_xx, we > enforce people to be GPL whatever they didn't asked to have the > namespaces in their code. > > Eric, why can we simply change EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL to EXPORT_SYMBOL for > init_net ?
Another suggestion/question, is it acceptable to say non-gpl driver should use init_task.nsproxy->net_ns instead of &init_net ?
Or does it make sense to have init_net gpl-exported, since we can access it through init_task which is exported without gpl mention ?
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