On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 9:32 PM, Erik Trimble <erik.trim...@oracle.com>wrote:
> On 6/10/2010 9:04 PM, Rodrigo E. De León Plicet wrote: > >> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Anurag Agarwal<anu...@kqinfotech.com> >> wrote: >> >> >>> We at KQInfotech, initially started on an independent port of ZFS to >>> linux. >>> When we posted our progress about port last year, then we came to know >>> about >>> the work on LLNL port. Since then we started working on to re-base our >>> changing on top Brian's changes. >>> >>> We are working on porting ZPL on that code. Our current status is that >>> mount/unmount is working. Most of the directory operations and read/write >>> is >>> also working. There is still lot more development work and testing that >>> needs to be going in this. But we are committed to make this happen so >>> please stay tuned. >>> >>> >> >> Good times ahead! >> >> > I don't mean to be a PITA, but I'm assuming that someone lawyerly has had > the appropriate discussions with the porting team about how linking against > the GPL'd Linux kernel means your kernel module has to be GPL-compatible. > It doesn't matter if you distribute it outside the general kernel source > tarball, what matters is that you're linking against a GPL program, and the > old GPL v2 doesn't allow for a non-GPL-compatibly-licensed module to do > that. > > GPL is a distribution license, not a usage license. You can manually download all the GPL and non-GPL code you want, so long as you do it separately from each other. Then you can compile them all into a single binary on your own system, and use it all you want on that system. The GPL does not affect anything that happens on that system. If you try to copy those binaries off to use on another system, then the GPL kicks in and everything breaks down. IOW, the GPL has absolutely no bearing on what you compile and run on your system ... so long as you don't distribute the code and/or binaries together. This is how a lot of out-of-tree drivers and filesystems work in Linux. There are even apps that make managing this easier. For example, Debian ships with module-assistant that handles the downloading of source, compiling, and installing on your system. All without being affected by the GPL-ness of the kernel, or the non-GPL-ness of the external source code. > As a workaround, take a look at what nVidia did for their X driver - it > uses a GPL'd kernel module as a shim, which their codebase can then call > from userland. Which is essentially what the ZFS FUSE folks have been > reduced to doing. > > The nvidia shim is only needed to be able to ship the non-GPL binary driver with the GPL binary kernel. If you don't use the binaries, you don't use the shim. -- Freddie Cash fjwc...@gmail.com
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