Re: ATI drivers also tainted ?

Janaka <janakas@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Dec 9, 2:45 pm, Cork Soaker <Thunderb...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
Cork Soaker <Thunderb...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Priam wrote:
I recently learned that:

fglrx is the name of the Linux display driver used for ATI
Radeon and ATI FireGL family video adapters and stands for
"FireGL and Radeon for X". It contains free open source as well
as proprietary and closed source parts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fglrx

The Catalyst driver, provided by ATI, is a fglrx driver. So,
even though only some of the code is proprietary, it is just as
tainted as the NVIDIA's.
Just because the source is closed, doesn't make it "tainted".

Ummm... that's exactly what tainted means.
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/#s1-18

That's not what tainted means at all.  Just because some geek doc says
it, doesn't mean you can just change the meaning of words to suit your
taste or have a go at closed-sourcers.

OSI Layer 8

Context, Context, Context!!! Since this thread is in a group called
"comp.os.linux.hardware", tainted means EXACTLY what Joe says. It
means "To corrupt morally" ( check <http://dictionary.reference.com/
browse/tainted>, third meaning). In linux kernel world, where
everything is meant to be open-source, tainted means exactly that "To
corrupt morally".

Wrong again. In the Linux kernel context "tainted" means that a
closed module has been loaded, thus "tainting" the running kernel as a
whole. The taintedness is not an attribute of the module on its own.
It is also not a matter of morality. It is merely a flag indicating
that unknown code has been loaded, and thus debugging a crash is with
that kernel is likely to be difficult since source code is not
available.

--
Måns Rullgård
mans@xxxxxxxxx
.