Changes in the Linux Kernel and the Impact on Proprietary Modules

While chaos is brewing in SUSE and Red Hat land, Canonical stays the course and doubles down on the Linux desktop. Plus, our thoughts on the kernel team GPL-blocking NVIDIA.

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• AMD Open-Source GPU Kernel Driver Above 5 Million Lines, Entire Linux Kernel At 34.8 Million
• Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules — It changes the behavior of symbol_get(), causing it to fail when asked to look up a symbol that is not marked GPL-only. This is an inversion of the usual test, which denies access to symbols that are marked GPL-only. The reasoning is that symbol_get() has always been intended for low-level cooperation deep within the kernel, where everything is expected to be GPL-only anyway.
• Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA’s Proprietary Driver — Back in 2020 when the original defense was added, NVIDIA recommended avoiding the Linux 5.9 for the time being. They ended up having a supported driver several weeks later. It will be interesting to see this time how long Linux 6.6+ thwarts their kernel driver.
• [Hacker News] Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules
• PATCH: modules: only allow symbol_get of EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL modules — Given that symbol_get was only ever inteded for tightly cooperating modules using very internal symbols it is logical to restrict it to being used on EXPORY_SYMBOL_GPL and prevent nvidia from costly DMCA circumvention of access controls law suites.
• Ubuntu Desktop: Charting a course for the future — Recently, we embarked on an internal exercise to consolidate and bring structure to our values and goals for how we plan to evolve the desktop experience over the next few years. This post is designed to share the output of those discussions and give insight into the direction we’re going.
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