* Crispin Cowan (crispin@private) wrote: > James Morris wrote: > >Note: out of tree kernel code does not count for anything. It's not > >really part of the Linux kernel. Mainline maintainers don't care about it > >and should not be expected to. If you want them to care, for people to > >fix bugs in it for free, and for more people to use it, then submit the > >module for upstream inclusion. It seems rather strange that you haven't. > > > I find this to be a very odd perspective. > > I think of LSM as an API. Its purpose is precisely to provide a layer of > abstraction so that kernel maintainers do *not* have to maintain the > modules. Linus said *very explicitly* that he did not want to maintain > security modules, and that was the point of LSM. I know of a large > number of LSM modules in development all over the place, and discounting > them just because they have not been imposed on the kernel community > seems arbitrary. So this "does not count" stuff sounds like a > contrivance to me. > > I had *assumed* that the Linux kernel community was not interested in > maintaining and bugfixing my module, and so I deliberately avoided > submitting it as a courtesy. I similarly do not submit my applications > for mainline inclusion just because they use some Linux syscalls. OK. this is a major misconception. James did a good job of describing the 'rules of the game,' but I'll reiterate. Core kernel code is there to serve its users. The users are considered to be those in-tree (and also those making a concerted effort to get there). > However, if mainstream kernel inclusion is required to "count" as a > user, then I'm happy to do that. The module code is GPL anyway, and > we'll start looking at what it will take to push it to mainstream. This > seems like a weird requirement to me, but if it is what's required, I > don't have a problem with it. Put it this way...in-tree code has a say in the interfaces it uses, out of tree code doesn't really have the same luxury. There's no such thing as a stable internal kernel api. Being out of tree means you risk losing a functional piece of an api simply because in-tree users no longer needed it.
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