Re: Non-GPL export of invalidate_mmap_range

Paul E. McKenney
2004-02-18T14:00:21Z

On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 01:51:35PM +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-02-18 at 01:19, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > IBM shipped the promised SAN Filesystem some months ago.
> >
> > Neat, but it's hard to see the relevance of this to your patch.
> >
> > I don't see any licensing issues with the patch because the filesystem
> > which needs it clearly meets Linus's "this is not a derived work" criteria.
>
> it does?

I believe so.

> It needed no changes to work on linux?

There is a small shim layer required, but the bulk of the code
implementing GPFS is common between AIX and Linux. It was on AIX
first by quite a few years.

> it only uses "core unix" apis ?

If they are made available, yes. That is the point of this patch,
after all. ;-)

> it needs no changes to the core kernel? *buzz*

You -can- run GPFS in the 2.4 kernel without core-kernel patches,
as long as you don't mind putting up with mmap/page-fault races and
with NFS exports from different nodes handing out the same lock to two
different NFS clients. ;-)

> It doesn't require knowledge of deep and changing internals ? *buzz*

That is indeed the idea.

> It doesn't need changing for various kernel versions ?

It is tested on specific kernel versions. Clearly moving from 2.4 to
2.6 requires some change.

> I remember this baby overriding syscalls and the like not too long
> ago...

???

> The word "clearly" isn't correct imo. Just because something has a few
> lines of code that started on another OS doesn't make it "clearly" not a
> derived work, at least not in my eyes.

Hmmm... You seem to have a rather expansive definition of
"a few lines of code". ;-)

Thanx, Paul