Re: incorrect taint of ndiswrapper

From: Gianluca Alberici
Date: Mon Oct 23 2006 - 05:14:24 EST


Hi,

if that can help, the problem with the undefined syms in ndiswrapper is that the module was tainted, and couldnt get EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL'd __create_workqueue...

I applied Chase patch...everything goes.

In my opinion i would avoid tainting ndiswrapper.

Gianluca

Giridhar Pemmasani wrote:

--- Chase Venters <chase.venters@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On Monday 23 October 2006 00:40, Giridhar Pemmasani wrote:


It seems that the kernel module loader taints ndiswrapper module as
proprietary, but it is not - it is fully GPL: see
http://directory.fsf.org/sysadmin/hookup/ndiswrapper.html


Indeed. 'ndiswrapper' is intentionally tainted by kernel/module.c because
it is used to load and run unknown binary / proprietary code in kernel-space.
If this unknown binary / proprietary code were to contain a bug (which all
code of that complexity tends to), it might write to memory it doesn't own, or coerce a device to do so on its behalf, making a kernel crash dump analysis

into a wild goose chase (hence the reason for kernel taint).



Yes, I agree on the purpose of tainting the kernel.



Note that when a driver is loaded, ndiswrapper does taint the kernel (to


be


more accurate, it should check if the driver being loaded is GPL or not,
but that is not done).


Are you saying ndiswrapper voluntarily calls add_taint() whenever it loads
an NDIS driver?



Exactly - the loader within ndiswrapper taints kernel versions 2.6.10 and
newer (older kernels don't have a way of tainting the kernel). The code is in
loader.c in ndiswrapper.



Are there even any examples of GPL-licensed NDIS drivers?



I don't remember off hand, but sometime back there was discussion on related
topic of weather ndiswrapper should be in debian-main or not, and someone
pointed out a GPL ndis driver. (BTW, after much discussion on debian devel
list, the developers agreed that ndiswrapper belongs in debian-main.)

Giri

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