Netgpu and the hazards of proprietary kernel modules
1–10 of 104 posts
Re: Netgpu and the hazards of proprietary kernel modules
#2NVIDIA is even undermining kernel development that they had no hand in, is this a first?
Re: Netgpu and the hazards of proprietary kernel modules
#3NVIDIA is even undermining kernel development that they had no hand in, is this a first?
> The sad part is that, by all appearances, the goal of this work was not to add functionality for NVIDIA GPUs in particular. Lemon does not seem to be an NVIDIA employee; the patches included a Facebook email address.
Re: Netgpu and the hazards of proprietary kernel modules
#4It wasn't clear from the article, and I can't figure out the answer really, but I'm curious if this will impact any existing popular modules. For example the NVIDIA driver - is it affected by the symbol import limitation as proposed now?
Re: Netgpu and the hazards of proprietary kernel modules
#5I feel like all this needless bureaucracy could've been avoided completely if Linux hadn't turned into a target for everyone to (try to) put code in. The GPL allows modification and redistribution, after all.
With this patch applied, any module that imports symbols from a proprietary module is itself marked as being proprietary, denying it access to GPL-only symbols.
That's starting to sound like DRM.
Re: Netgpu and the hazards of proprietary kernel modules
#6I feel like all this needless bureaucracy could've been avoided completely if Linux hadn't turned into a target for everyone to (try to) put code in. The GPL allows modification and redistribution, after all. With this patch applied, any module that imports symbols from a proprietary module is itself marked as being proprietary, denying it access to GPL-only symbols. That's starting to sound like DRM.
> That's starting to sound like DRM.
It's close, but the key difference is it doesn't actually restrict the user, since you're both legally allowed and technically able to build and use a kernel without that code.
Re: Netgpu and the hazards of proprietary kernel modules
#7NVIDIA is even undermining kernel development that they had no hand in, is this a first?
> The sad part is that, by all appearances, the goal of this work was not to add functionality for NVIDIA GPUs in particular. Lemon does not seem to be an NVIDIA employee; the patches included a Facebook email address.
Its interesting the person posting the objection uses an @nvidia.com address.
Re: Netgpu and the hazards of proprietary kernel modules
#8I feel like all this needless bureaucracy could've been avoided completely if Linux hadn't turned into a target for everyone to (try to) put code in. The GPL allows modification and redistribution, after all. With this patch applied, any module that imports symbols from a proprietary module is itself marked as being proprietary, denying it access to GPL-only symbols. That's starting to sound like DRM.
It's not DRM, the entire check basically amounts to "if (strcmp(license, "GPL") != 0)", where "license" is a user supplied string.
Re: Netgpu and the hazards of proprietary kernel modules
#9> The sad part is that, by all appearances, the goal of this work was not to add functionality for NVIDIA GPUs in particular.
I don't see how that can be true given that it is designed to speed up ML, and only nVidia graphics cards are used for ML. Approximately nobody uses Intel or AMD.
Maybe they meant it wasn't written by an nVidia employee? But it's clearly intended to be used with nVidia GPUs in particular.
Re: Netgpu and the hazards of proprietary kernel modules
#10NVIDIA is even undermining kernel development that they had no hand in, is this a first?
> The sad part is that, by all appearances, the goal of this work was not to add functionality for NVIDIA GPUs in particular. Lemon does not seem to be an NVIDIA employee; the patches included a Facebook email address.
That's a really weird conclusion given that it specifically targets nVidia GPUs, it's for machine learning, and everybody uses nVidia GPUs for machine learning.
I don't see what working for nVidia has to do with it. He works for a company that uses mountains of nVidia cards for ML.