On Wed, May 03, 2017 at 04:21:01PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > This is from last merge window, and the reason I react now is that > nobody noticed or cared until we had a release.. > > On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 11:57 PM, Ingo Molnar <mi...@kernel.org> wrote: > > > > Peter Zijlstra (1): > > locking/refcounts: Out-of-line everything > > This one is all good generally, but it has one really stupid side > effect: it makes refcounting GPL-only. > > That's just silly. These are functions that atomically add and > subtract one. The only thing that making them GPL-only can possibly do > is to make people hack around it, and lose the overflow handling > debugging in the process.
These people are out-of-tree dubious licensed modules, right? I really _really_ don't care about those. > It also breaks any kref uses. Which is what drivers etc are supposed to use. Greg KH had this to say: "As all of the previous kref functions were in a GPL-only header file, and included directly that way, they were already GPL-only symbols, so there really was no change here except now the linker checks them. If you have questions about using inline GPL-only functions from a .h file, in a non-GPL codebase, please consult your corporate lawyer to get clarification." https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170308094810.gb30...@kroah.com > So that "move from inline to out-of-line" had a big subtle semantic > change that was probably not intentional, and certainly not > documented. I'll take the not documented bit.