Re: RFC: virtualbox tainting.

Parag Warudkar
2011-10-12T00:57:38Z

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> wrote:
> The number of bug reports we get from people with virtualbox loaded are
> truly astonishing.  It's GPL, but sadly that doesn't mean it's good.
> Nearly all of these bugs look like random corruption. (corrupt linked lists,
> corrupt page tables, and just plain 'weird' crashes).
>
> This diff adds tainting to the module loader to treat it as we do with stuff
> from staging/ (crap). With this tainting in place, automatic bug filing tools
> can opt out of automatically filing kernel bugs, and inform the user to file
> bugs somewhere more appropriate.
>

Why can't the automatic bug filing tools have a user space list of
offending modules that it can use to opt out of automatically filing
kernel bugs? May be it can keep that list as part of a file in a
package that can be updated as and when more out of tree modules are
found. This can also be used for all out of tree modules - if module
is not part of standard kernel modules then opt out. I think this can
and should all be done in user space.

If people still report bugs manually may be have bugzilla ask them for
list of modules loaded and run a batch job to scan and close the ones
with blacklisted modules.

Parag