Re: Non-GPL export of invalidate_mmap_range

Paul E. McKenney
2004-02-19T09:00:45Z

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 11:29:00AM +0100, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
> On 2004-02-18T14:51:32,
> Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> said:
>
> > a) Does the export make technical sense? Do filesystems have
> > legitimate need for access to this symbol?
> >
> > (really, a) is sufficient grounds, but for real-world reasons:)
>
> Technically, I assume both OCFS, Lustre, (OpenGFS), PolyServe and
> basically /everyone/ doing a cluster file system, proprietary or not,
> will eventually need this capability. Vendors have included hooks for
> this in 2.4 already anyway.
>
> So on technical grounds, I'm strongly inclined to support it, but I
> would like to suggest that it is ensured that the hook is sufficient for
> all of the named CFS.
>
> Paul, have you spoken with them?

Lustre, yes. At OLS last summer, Peter Braam said that it was useful.
The others, no, but they are certainly free to chime in.

> > b) Does the IBM filsystem meet the kernel's licensing requirements?
>
> If you are worried about this one, you can export it GPL-only, which as
> an Open Source developer I'd appreciate, but from a real-world business
> perspective would be unhappy about ;-)

Been there, done that. ;-)

Thanx, Paul

> Sincerely,
> Lars Marowsky-Bree <lmb@suse.de>
>
> --
> High Availability & Clustering \ ever tried. ever failed. no matter.
> SUSE Labs | try again. fail again. fail better.
> Research & Development, SUSE LINUX AG \ -- Samuel Beckett