Re: spinlocks, the GPL, and binary-only modules

From: Jeff Garzik (jgarzik@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Nov 21 2002 - 12:21:21 EST


Mark Mielke wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 05:08:45AM -0800, Andre Hedrick wrote:
>
> >On 21 Nov 2002, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> >
> >>It is if the AUTHOR then decides to distribute the resulting binary
> >>which would contain a mix of GPL and non GPL work..
> >
> >The mix is a direct result of developers knowingly inlining critical C
> >code into the headers. If this code was placed in proper .c files
> and not
> >set in a .h then the potential for accidental mixing is removed.
> >This would limit and restrict the headers to being structs and extern
> >functions to call.
>
>
> Some (not all) of the inlined functions are 'inline' to accelerate the
> kernel.
>
> Perhaps, though, the inlined functions should be declared:
>
> #ifdef __GNUC__
> # define INLINE extern inline
> #else
> # define INLINE inline
> #endif

[...]

Please review prior posts in this thread, notably from Andrew Morton and
Cort Dougan. They describe a much better method of doing this.

It still doesn't handle macros, though they are much less of a worry
since Linux kernel emphasizes inlines over macros.

        Jeff

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