Re: Add tainting for proprietary helper modules.

["linux-os \(Dick Johnson\)" <linux-os@analogic.com>]

On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, Dave Jones wrote:

> Kernels that have had Windows drivers loaded into them are undebuggable.
> I've wasted a number of hours chasing bugs filed in Fedora bugzilla
> only to find out much later that the user had used such 'helpers',
> and their problems were unreproducable without them loaded.
>
> Acked-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>
> Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
>
> --- linux-2.6.14/kernel/module.c~	2005-11-29 16:44:00.000000000 -0500
> +++ linux-2.6.14/kernel/module.c	2005-11-29 17:03:55.000000000 -0500
> @@ -1723,6 +1723,11 @@ static struct module *load_module(void _
> 	/* Set up license info based on the info section */
> 	set_license(mod, get_modinfo(sechdrs, infoindex, "license"));
>
> +	if (strcmp(mod->name, "ndiswrapper") == 0)
> +		add_taint(TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE);
> +	if (strcmp(mod->name, "driverloader") == 0)
> +		add_taint(TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE);
> +
> #ifdef CONFIG_MODULE_UNLOAD
> 	/* Set up MODINFO_ATTR fields */
> 	setup_modinfo(mod, sechdrs, infoindex);

So your are blacklisting certain drivers? If so, you probably
should have an array containing their names plus a header-file
into which the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of future module-
names can be added.

... Not meant as a joke or an affront. User's should be able to
know what hardware to NOT purchase because of the proprietary
nature of their drivers. Putting a couple "exceptions" into
code as above is not good coding practice. If you need to
exclude stuff, there should be an exclusion procedure that
treats all that stuff equally, no?

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.6.13.4 on an i686 machine (5589.44 BogoMips).
Warning : 98.36% of all statistics are fiction.
.

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