Re: incorrect taint of ndiswrapper

Stephen Hemminger
2006-10-26T16:05:41Z

On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:39:59 +0100
Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

> Ar Mer, 2006-10-25 am 20:59 -0700, ysgrifennodd Andrew Morton:
> > May be so. But this patch was supposed to print a helpful taint message to
> > draw our attention to the fact that ndis-wrapper was in use. The patch was
> > not intended to cause gpl'ed modules to stop loading
>
> The stopping loading is purely because it now uses _GPLONLY symbols,
> which is fine until the user wants to load a windows driver except for
> the old CIPE driver. Some assumptions broke somewhere along the way and
> the chain of events that was never forseen unfolded.
>
> > Now, if we do want to disallow gpl module loading after ndis-wrapper has
> > been used then fine
>
> The problem is we do the dynamic link at module load time. We would have
> to unlink the module if it tried to taint itself, which is clearly not
> what the end user needs to suffer. Having the taint function actually
> taint and printk + return a "Linked gplonly you can't" error seems the
> better solution.
>
> Really ndiswrapper shouldn't be using _GPLONLY symbols, that would
> actually make it useful to the binary driver afflicted again and more
> likely to be legal.
>

What are the symbols in question? A simple test would be to take the GPL
MODULE_LICENSE() off of ndiswrapper and try loading it.

--
Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@osdl.org>