<entire post severely snipped for brevity> On Mon, 17 Aug 2015 00:53:37 -0500 Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> walt wrote: > >>> Linus and friends have been marking lots of existing > >>> kernel symbols with the SYMBOL_EXPORT_GPL macro, which was > >>> designed to block the loading of any kernel module not explicitly > >>> licensed as GPL software. > The only module I have > is Nvidia but that is one thing that doesn't work at times. > Sometimes, it doesn't want to boot all the way. It doesn't even get > through the kernel loading everything up at times. The Nvidia module is causing your problem then, because Nvidia supplies their binary blob under their own proprietary license. I'm using an elderly version of x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers on an elderly machine, but when I run 'modinfo -l nvidia' I see 'NVIDIA' as the response. If the response isn't 'GPL' then the affected kernels will refuse to load the module at boot time. The kernel devs have provided a workaround for the problem, however: You (or a gentoo dev) need to edit the source code for the problem kernel by changing the SYMBOL_EXPORT_GPL to SYMBOL_EXPORT. That macro appears maybe hundreds of places in the kernel sources, and has been there for years now, but only one or two of those source files needs to be patched, depending on which of those exported symbols is needed by your particular binary driver (e.g. nvidia-drivers or ati-drivers). This whole GPL/module thing is far from new. What's new is that the kernel devs are slowly adding more kernel symbols to their black list. I think the idea is to turn up the pressure very slowly on companies like Nividia and ATI to discourage them from providing proprietary drivers while not driving them out of the linux market completely. Every year linux is getting stronger and the devs can afford to be pushier with wealthy corporations who need more linux customers.
