Re: ndiswrapper and GPL-only symbols redux

Jon Masters
2008-01-30T00:21:23Z

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 16:22 -0500, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> Hello!
>
> It have come to my attention that a patch has been committed to the
> kernel with the explicit purpose of tainting ndiswrapper - the kernel
> module allowing Windows NDIS drivers for Ethernet and Wireless cards to
> be used by the kernel.
>
> That's the commit in question:
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=0aa5bd52d0c49ca56d24584c646e6544ccbb3dc9

Yup. There was (what I thought was) a bug in the existing logic (an
explicit match on "ndiswrapper", and a setting of the global kernel
taint flags) and I corrected it to do what I thought it was actually
intending to do, but hadn't been. Was I mistaken? What's the point of
setting the global taint if we don't know why we set that?

> - ndiswrapper is licensed under GPL

Yes it is. But I thought the existing code was intending to taint the
kernel (that's what it does), so it would really help to identify why it
tainted the kernel, by calling add_taint_module instead of add_taint. I
didn't put the existing match in there...don't shoot the messenger :)

> - ndiswrapper needs GPL-only symbols

Another fix would be for ndiswrapper to explicitly set the taint when it
loads a tainted driver? Or do we just want to go back to globally
"tainting" the kernel without assigning the blame to any module?

Jon.