[OpenAFS] A few questions about OpenAFS 1.4

[Russ Allbery]

Leroy Tennison <leroy_tennison@prodigy.net> writes:

> I'm getting the following message using the Linux openafs-client script
> on Fedora Core 3 (no patches, just a base install)

> openafs: module license 'http://www.openafs.org/dl/license10.html' 
> taints kernel.
> openafs: no version for "sys_close" found: kernel tainted.
> Found system call table at 0x234d4c0 (pattern scan)
> Starting AFS cache scan...found 7 non-empty cache files (0%%).

> However, things seem to work, should I be concerned?

No.  This is normal.

> Can someone explain this "tainting the kernel" thing, it's not the first
> time I've seen it.

The Linux kernel developers are only interested in supporting kernel
modules that are free software, and are generally only interested in
supporting kernel modules that might be included in the mainline kernel
(which requires GPL licensing).  OpenAFS is licensed under a free software
license (the IBM Public License) which is not GPL-compatible.  As such, it
"taints" your kernel in that the kernel developers probably won't want to
look at your bug reports.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>