Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 28 Apr 2004 13:26:34 +0300 | From | Ville Herva <> | Subject | Re: What does tainting actually mean? |
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On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 01:51:20AM -0400, you [Karim Yaghmour] wrote: > > Nigel Cunningham wrote: > >What I mean is, how does it help to know that a kernel is tainted? When > >I'm working on Software Suspend and someone sends me an oops, I don't > >really care whether it's marked as tainted or not. For all I know, even > >if it's not tainted, they may have thrown in half a dozen different > >patches aside from Suspend, any one of which could be playing a role in > >the appearance of the oops. It doesn't help me to know that the kernel > > The legal/moral implications of taint/binary-mods/etc. aside, I think it > may be worth putting some thought into coming up with a way to identify > which patches were applied to a kernel -- given the wide-spread use of this > method to add/remove/amend kernel functionality. Maybe there should be a > /proc/sys/kernel/patches file at runtime which would provide a list of > applied patches and some characteristics/description? When patches are > applied, there could then be a toplevel .patches file which all patch > submitters/providers/distributors would be strongly encouraged or > <form>insert your favorite coercive method or torture technique here</form> > to amend as they add their code. At build time, the makefile could then > use this file the generate some header used by the code printing out the > /proc/sys/kernel/patches. At oops time, the content of this file would also > be part of the dump.
It has been suggested before:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=linux.kernel.20020312114234.GF128921%40niksula.cs.hut.fi&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26q%3D%2BRe%253A%2B%255Bmodule%252Fpatch%255D%2Boptional%2B%252Fproc%252Fpatches%2B%253F%253F%2B%26btnG%3DSearch
but it didn't exactly raise enormeous interest.
-- v --
v@iki.fi
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