Re: incorrect taint of ndiswrapper

Chase Venters
2006-10-23T06:26:24Z

On Monday 23 October 2006 00:40, Giridhar Pemmasani wrote:
> It seems that the kernel module loader taints ndiswrapper module as
> proprietary, but it is not - it is fully GPL: see
> http://directory.fsf.org/sysadmin/hookup/ndiswrapper.html

Indeed. 'ndiswrapper' is intentionally tainted by kernel/module.c because it
is used to load and run unknown binary / proprietary code in kernel-space. If
this unknown binary / proprietary code were to contain a bug (which all code
of that complexity tends to), it might write to memory it doesn't own, or
coerce a device to do so on its behalf, making a kernel crash dump analysis
into a wild goose chase (hence the reason for kernel taint).

> Note that when a driver is loaded, ndiswrapper does taint the kernel (to be
> more accurate, it should check if the driver being loaded is GPL or not,
> but that is not done).

Are you saying ndiswrapper voluntarily calls add_taint() whenever it loads an
NDIS driver?

Are there even any examples of GPL-licensed NDIS drivers?

> Thanks,
> Giri
>

Thanks,
Chase