Re: Tainted Modules Help Notices

James Sutherland
2001-10-11T12:10:18Z

On Thu, 11 Oct 2001, Pekka Pietikäinen wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 11, 2001 at 09:35:34AM +0000, Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
> > How about
> >
> > "BSD (included in kernel source)"
> >
> > to make clear that this is part of the distributed kernel _sources_.
> >
> > "included in kernel" could also be a 3rd party binary only driver
> > added by a Linux distribution vendor.
> Or even something like "BSD (unmodified source freely available)", which
> would cover 3rd party drivers as well.

"BSD (GPL compatible)"? Or a more generic "Other GPL compatible"?

For that matter, it's not GPL compatibility that matters here, it's source
availability for debugging purposes; AIUI, even an "old-style BSD" module
shouldn't taint the kernel.

Better still, rather than the licensing details, have the source URL.
Either MODULE_SOURCE_URL("http://example.com/drivers/linux/scsi.html") or
MODULE_BINARY_ONLY, with the latter tainting the kernel since the source
is not *freely* available?

James.
--
"Our attitude with TCP/IP is, `Hey, we'll do it, but don't make a big
system, because we can't fix it if it breaks -- nobody can.'"

"TCP/IP is OK if you've got a little informal club, and it doesn't make
any difference if it takes a while to fix it."
-- Ken Olson, in Digital News, 1988