On Wed, Mar 08, 2017 at 01:25:48AM -0800, john.hubb...@gmail.com wrote: > From: John Hubbard <jhubb...@nvidia.com> > > Hi, > > Say, I'm 99% sure that this was just an oversight, so > I'm sticking my neck out here and floating a patch to > Put Things Back. I'm hoping that there is not some > firm reason to GPL-protect the basic kref_get and > kref_put routines, because when designing some > recent new (open-source, yay!) device drivers, we relied > on this being available, even for MIT-licensed code.
MIT-licensed code should be just fine with GPL symbols, just use the correct MODULE_LICENSE() setting and all is good. As all of the previous kref functions were in a GPL-only header file, and included directly that way, they were already GPL-only symbols, so there really was no change here except now the linker checks them. If you have questions about using inline GPL-only functions from a .h file, in a non-GPL codebase, please consult your corporate lawyer to get clarification. thanks, greg k-h
