Re: [PATCH] Blacklist binary-only modules lying about their license

Marc Boucher
2004-04-29T21:33:46Z

Giuliano Colla wrote:
> Can you honestly tell apart the two cases, if you don't make a it a case of
> "religion war"?

On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 11:15:13AM -0400, Timothy Miller answered:
>
> Firmware downloaded into a piece of hardware can't corrupt the kernel in the
> host.
>
> (Unless it's a bus master which writes to random memory, which might be
> possible, but there is hardware you can buy to watch PCI transactions.)

and unless it's a card with binary-only, proprietary BIOS code called at
runtime by the kernel, for example by the vesafb.c video driver,
which despite this has a MODULE_LICENSE("GPL").

Could someone explain why such execution of evil proprietary binary-only
code on the host CPU should not also "taint" the kernel? ;-)

Marc