Re: spinlocks, the GPL, and binary-only modules

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

Mark Mielke wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 05:08:45AM -0800, Andre Hedrick wrote:
>
> >On 21 Nov 2002, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> >
> >>It is if the AUTHOR then decides to distribute the resulting binary
> >>which would contain a mix of GPL and non GPL work..
> >
> >The mix is a direct result of developers knowingly inlining critical C
> >code into the headers.  If this code was placed in proper .c files 
> and not
> >set in a .h then the potential for accidental mixing is removed.
> >This would limit and restrict the headers to being structs and extern
> >functions to call.
>
>
> Some (not all) of the inlined functions are 'inline' to accelerate the
> kernel.
>
> Perhaps, though, the inlined functions should be declared:
>
>    #ifdef __GNUC__
>    #  define INLINE extern inline
>    #else
>    #  define INLINE inline
>    #endif


[...]

Please review prior posts in this thread, notably from Andrew Morton and 
Cort Dougan.  They describe a much better method of doing this.

It still doesn't handle macros, though they are much less of a worry 
since Linux kernel emphasizes inlines over macros.

	Jeff