Re: ndiswrapper and GPL-only symbols redux

Pavel Roskin
2008-01-30T01:34:04Z

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 19:48 -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 01:35 +0100, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> > On Jan 29 2008 19:20, Jon Masters wrote:
>
> > >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?
> >
> > I think the global taint flag is always needed because you never know
> > what the proprietary module actually did to our memory. Unloading
> > the driver and ndiswrapper should retain some sort of taintedness
> > should it oops much later.
>
> It will. The module taint variant also sets the global taint. But it
> helps to know why you set that if you oops now and get a list of
> modules. Yeah, we know about ndiswrapper, I just mean in general.

Then we can move add_taint_module() for ndiswrapper closer to the end of
load_module(), so that it's not prevented from using GPL-only symbols.

driverloader should stay where it is, since we don't trust its license.

> Man, that'll teach me to send one-liners without checking the entire
> history of LWN stories beforehand. I'm going to the gym to escape :)

I'm actually so relieved that it has been mistake, just like it was the
last time. Good luck!

--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin