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Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Oh wow the comments on Phoronix for this one are bonkers.
From what I understand (because it wasn't clear to me from either of the TLDRs posted here) Nvidia's proprietary graphics driver has been calling parts of the kernel that they shouldn't be, because their driver is closed source.
These seem to be parts of the kernel that another company may own patents to, but has only licensed it to the kernel for free use with GPL open source code only, i.e. closed source/proprietary code is not allowed to use it.
Nvidia seems to have open sourced a tiny communication shim to try and bypass this restriction, so their closed source driver talks to the shim, and the shim talks to the restricted code in the kernel, that Nvidia does not have a license to use. This is a DMCA violation, hence why the Kernel devs are putting in preventions to block the shim, as far as I can see.
I don't understand the small minority of commenters there defending a la soulless corp Nvidia, who is blatantly in the wrong here. Some commenters have gone as far as to call the Linux kernel maintainers "zealots", would not be surprised if they are alts for Nvidia devs...
Edit: typo
But why is it a problem if they call on parts of the kernal they shouldn't? is it just a privacy concern, does it also impact performance? i don't understand
As the commenter stated, it is a copyright issue. Nvidia is not allowed to use this code in a proprietary driver.
I don't see how the copyright mechanism works here. The GPL has rules about linking to GPL code, enforced by the notion that the linked binary is a protected derivative work. Going and finding out where in memory some functions are and jumping to them is not going to create a derivative work.
The Linux devs just have a rule about who they want to call these symbols and are trying to enforce it themselves.
You not seeing how this violates the copyright does not mean you are correct
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html
Had this clause been found enforceable in any court case? (I'm not saying it hasn't been - I don't know.)
I don't know if there has been a specific case surrounding a shim like Nvidia is using, but since it is in the license it should fall under a simple copyright violation.