Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:11:35 -0700 | From | Randy Dunlap <> | Subject | Re: incorrect taint of ndiswrapper |
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On Mon, 23 Oct 2006 19:43:47 -0700 (PDT) Giridhar Pemmasani wrote:
> --- Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote: > > > Taint is used to identify situations where debug data may not be good, > > that may be proprietary or other dubiously legal code, it may be forcing > > SMP active on non SMP suitable systems, it may be overriding certain > > options in a potentially hazardous fashion. Taint exists primarily to > > help debugging data analysis. > > I have read the history of the patch that marked ndiswrapper as "proprietary > module", which is not correct (and that was the point of my original post). > All the posts realted to this referred to issues with loading binary code > into kernel (and since ndiswrapper does taint the kernel when a driver is > loaded, this again is misplaced).
The kernel should not depend on a not-in-tree kernel module to taint the kernel. The kernel can and should do that itself.
(big) If ndiswrapper were ever added to the kernel tree, then that would be a reasonable place to do/add the tainting.
> > EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() is used to assert that the symbol is absolutely > > definitely not a public symbol. EXPORT_SYMBOL exports symbols which > > might be but even then the GPL derivative work rules apply. When you > > mark a driver GPL it is permitted to use _GPL symbols, but if it does so > > it cannot then go and load other non GPL symbols and expect people not > > to question its validity. > > I was not fully aware of this issue until now (I have read posts related to > this issue now). Does this mean that any module that loads binary code can't > be GPL, even those that load firmware files? How is > non-GPL-due-to-transitivity going to be checked? Why does module loader mark > only couple of modules as non-GPL, when there are other drivers that load > some sort of binary code? It is understandable to mark a module as non-GPL if > it is lying about its license, but as far as that is concerned, ndiswrapper > (alone) is GPL.
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