On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 07:56:56PM +0000, Pete Leigh wrote: > If you want to take an ethical stance of not helping anyone who > uses closed drivers, that may be a defensible position. But it's no > use pretending there are well-founded and absolute technical > reasons for it -- it's an ethical choice, a thoroughgoing boycott if > you like, not a technical necessity. Well, partially true. The whole tainted kernel thing started after a bunch of developers got sick of seeing crashes that were only reproduced with the nvidia module. Alan Cox ran a go at reverse engineering it, and what he found was that it does a lot of reads and writes to aparantly random memory locations - an extremely unwise thing to do if you value stability. There's no hardware documentation, so there's no way to know what is going on or why. The tainting was added to weed out bug reports that were specious - not because the systems were necessarily "undebuggable", but rather because when code is reading and writing to undocumentable places in memory, you really have no idea what is going on. So, you're right - it's not completely undebuggable. But it's certainly not worth the time of a dev with better things to do. -- Ross Vandegrift ross@xxxxxxxxxxxx "The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell." --St. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, Book II, xviii, 37
