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Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 13:26:34 +0300
From: Ville Herva <vherva@viasys.com>
To: Karim Yaghmour <karim@opersys.com>
Cc: ncunningham@linuxmail.org,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: What does tainting actually mean?
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On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 01:51:20AM -0400, you [Karim Yaghmour] wrote:
> 
> Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> >What I mean is, how does it help to know that a kernel is tainted? When  
> >I'm working on Software Suspend and someone sends me an oops, I don't  
> >really care whether it's marked as tainted or not. For all I know, even 
> >if  it's not tainted, they may have thrown in half a dozen different 
> >patches  aside from Suspend, any one of which could be playing a role in 
> >the  appearance of the oops. It doesn't help me to know that the kernel 
> 
> The legal/moral implications of taint/binary-mods/etc. aside, I think it
> may be worth putting some thought into coming up with a way to identify
> which patches were applied to a kernel -- given the wide-spread use of this
> method to add/remove/amend kernel functionality. Maybe there should be a
> /proc/sys/kernel/patches file at runtime which would provide a list of
> applied patches and some characteristics/description? When patches are
> applied, there could then be a toplevel .patches file which all patch
> submitters/providers/distributors would be strongly encouraged or
> <form>insert your favorite coercive method or torture technique here</form>
> to amend as they add their code. At build time, the makefile could then
> use this file the generate some header used by the code printing out the
> /proc/sys/kernel/patches. At oops time, the content of this file would also
> be part of the dump.

It has been suggested before:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=linux.kernel.20020312114234.GF128921%40niksula.cs.hut.fi&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26q%3D%2BRe%253A%2B%255Bmodule%252Fpatch%255D%2Boptional%2B%252Fproc%252Fpatches%2B%253F%253F%2B%26btnG%3DSearch

but it didn't exactly raise enormeous interest.


-- v -- 

v@iki.fi

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