sched: some non-GPL symbols becoming GPL-only with CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT enabled

From: Angelo Haller
Date: Sat Nov 27 2021 - 19:24:49 EST


Greetings. I hope I picked the right mailing list, as this issue might be one that affects various subsystems and components:

When compiling kernel 5.15 (and 5.16-rc2) with `CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT` enabled, some of the symbols being exported as `EXPORT_SYMBOL` suddenly become `EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL` through transitive effects.

In particular the symbols `migrate_enable` and `migrate_disable` are currently marked as `EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL` - yet are called from multiple functions that are marked as `EXPORT_SYMBOL`.

Here an (incomplete?) listing of call sites I came across:

kernel/locking/spinlock_rt.c - rt_spin_unlock()
kernel/locking/spinlock_rt.c - rt_read_unlock()
kernel/locking/spinlock_rt.c - rt_write_unlock()
mm/highmem.c - kunmap_local_indexed()

The issue I'm facing in particular is kmap_atomic() calling `migrate_disable` and therefore suddenly becoming GPL-only. This breaks the out-of-tree CDDL licensed module ZFS and has been reported before already [0]. The conversation seemingly going nowhere - or patches at least not being applied upstream. Downstream issue for reference [1].

As the original implementation of `migrate_enable` and `migrate_disable` is apparently by Peter Zijlstra [2]. Peter would you be willing to re-license both symbols `migrate_enable` and `migrate_disable` as `EXPORT_SYMBOL`?

The bigger issue I'm seeing though is that there is currently no automated test to uncover exported symbols changing their license depending on build configuration? I am not intimately familiar with the API guarantees the kernel gives, but this seems like a violation. There might be other symbols with similar licensing problems.

I can open a bugzilla ticket too - if that is preferred.

Angelo


[0] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-rt-users/20201208212841.694b3022@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/T/
[1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/11097
[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rt/linux-rt-devel.git/diff/patches/0009-sched-Add-migrate_disable.patch?h=v5.9-rc8-rt14-patches&id=9a89bfdb3bc77aecdd0ff8cc69b595541c7b50c4