20 Nov
2005
20 Nov
'05
8:05 p.m.
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(a)lug.udel.edu
"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