Support for tainted kernel [LWN.net]

Support for tainted kernel

Posted Sep 5, 2007 22:48 UTC (Wed) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942)
Parent article: LCE: Linux, hardware vendors, and enterprise distributors

A part of the problem comes from the fact that distributors of enterprise kernels are willing to support customers who install binary-only modules. If the customer would know that loading those BLOBs means canceling support contract for the kernel, they may think twice before using such hardware, right?

Do Novel/RedHat provide such support?

to post comments

Support for tainted kernel

Posted Sep 6, 2007 1:25 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

If I recall correctly from the last time I had to deal with this, RedHat provides limited support for tainted kernels, restricted to modules from just a few vendors which presumably they have some kind of partnering with.

The incident that comes to mind involved EMC Powerpath modules on an otherwise untainted RHEL kernel (a few non-stock drivers but they were GPLd). (The modules weren't the cause of the problem, it turned out to be a known kernel bug that already had a fix, but it was hard to reproduce being load dependant, and 32GB core dumps are a pain to ship around.)

Support for tainted kernel

Posted Sep 6, 2007 16:56 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link] (1 responses)

With Novell SLES all third-party modules are unsupported. It won't even auto-load GPL'd third-party modules unless you change a configuration file.

Support for tainted kernel

Posted Sep 6, 2007 19:13 UTC (Thu) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

Then I wonder who installs those proprietary binary-only modules on enterprise kernels and why this is a problem at all? Surely this must not be Novell/RedHat customers.