From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 19:32:10 +0100 From: Lars Marowsky-Bree Subject: Re: Non-GPL export of invalidate_mmap_range Message-ID: <20040219183210.GX14000@marowsky-bree.de> References: <1077108694.4479.4.camel@laptop.fenrus.com> <20040218140021.GB1269@us.ibm.com> <20040218211035.A13866@infradead.org> <20040218150607.GE1269@us.ibm.com> <20040218222138.A14585@infradead.org> <20040218145132.460214b5.akpm@osdl.org> <20040218230055.A14889@infradead.org> <20040218162858.2a230401.akpm@osdl.org> <20040219123110.A22406@infradead.org> <20040219091129.GD1269@us.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In-Reply-To: <20040219091129.GD1269@us.ibm.com> Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: "Paul E. McKenney" , Christoph Hellwig , Andrew Morton , torvalds@osd.org, arjanv@redhat.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On 2004-02-19T01:11:29, "Paul E. McKenney" said: > > And pokes deep into internal structures that it shouldn't. > Again, the point of the patch is to get rid of such poking. I think this fiddling about this particular exported symbol is hiding the real issue. It seems that Christoph believes that _inherently_, any filesystem kernel module on Linux must be a derived work, because it is intimately tied into the kernel core / VFS. I can certainly see the reasoning here, and it is a valid point of view. Do we want to allow non-OSS filesystems in kernel space at all? That's the entire question. Personally, I would go with "No" and support the consequences of this, because I believe in Open Source; and that the value proposition of Linux is /not/ in binary-only modules, and I would /not/ sacrifice the OSS principles of the literal core of the Linux project for a short term pay-off. (But I'm personally trying to solve that by making them superfluous and putting them out of business by getting an OSS CFS, which seems to be more amiable ;-) Only if we can settle this, we can answer this export question. If we want to allow them, the export is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask for. If not, we probably need to add a few more _GPL barriers. A rule of thumb might be whether any code in the tree uses a given export, and if not, prune it. Anything which even we don't use or export across the user-land boundary certainly qualifies as a kernel interna. Currently, no kernel module seems to use this export. So I'd think such a point could certainly be made. Sincerely, Lars Marowsky-Bree -- High Availability & Clustering \ ever tried. ever failed. no matter. SUSE Labs | try again. fail again. fail better. Research & Development, SUSE LINUX AG \ -- Samuel Beckett -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: aart@kvack.org