Re: Linux 2.5 / 2.6 TODO (preliminary)

From: David Marshall (marshall@athena.net.dhis.org)
Date: Wed May 31 2000 - 16:16:53 EST


Gregory Maxwell <greg@linuxpower.cx> writes:

> On Wed, 31 May 2000, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
>
> > On Wed, May 31, 2000 at 03:59:48AM +0200, David Weinehall wrote:
> > > N IPsec
> > > N International Kernel-patches
> >
> > Do you really think all that crypto stuff should be in a standard kernel?
> > Even if there's no longer any problem to *export* it from Amerika, there
> > might be problems *importing* it into more restrictive countries like
> > China or France or so...
>
> France fixed their policy; It's more liberal then the US.
>
> Any info on china?

Is there any way that we can further abstract the crypto stuff[1] so that
the crypto kernel patches are such that they only add files, and
modifications are done in the mainline kernel tree?

Right now, the biggest problem with the crypto patches is that they
tend to fail between kernel revisions. There also appears to be a
problem with header files with Glibc, because the glibc header files
aren't patched like the ones in the source tree[2]. Of course, modifying
the Glibc header files directly would be bad.

So to patch 2.3.99, you are stuck trying to find the latest version of
the patches (2.3.42, as far as I know) and handling the
rejects. Unless I missed something or I was the victim of a cosmic
ray, there's some kind of bug introduced when you do this particular
combination which causes things to lock up after a few seconds of
heavy disk activity. I haven't plowed through the code and tries to
debug that yet.

Ideally from what I'm thinking, the crypto patches would just have to
add linux/crypto.

So perhaps:

  N Stubs for crypto code in the kernel.
  N Separate crypto patch which is kept up to date.
  W Some way to cleanly set up the header files so that things relying
    on the modifications made by the patch will work.

[1] I dislike the term "International kernel patch." It sounds like
    the patch adds support for other languages, or some mystic thing
    so that it will run in other countries.

[2] I haven't investigated this one beyond an initial look.

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