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Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/4244409

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The kernel isn't requiring the driver be GPL.

Nvidias driver straight up violated the license by talking to parts of the kernel it wasn't legally allowed to talk to, by shipping its own tiny open source shim to sit between the proprietary and open source parts they wanted to illegally have interoperate.

This is a case of nvidia straight up actually breaking the law with a literal hack. Prompting linux into implementing new security measures.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The shim module smuggles GPL-only kernel symbols into the non-GPL binary blob. Because the actual module using those symbols is not GPL compatible this violates the GPL license.

From Linus Torvalds mouth:

anybody who were to change a xyz_GPL to the non-GPL one in order to use it with a non-GPL module would almost immediately fall under the "willful infringement" thing, and that it would make it MUCH easier to get triple damages and/or injunctions, since they clearly knew about it.

In short, nvidia is playing with "please sue me" button.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'll add that to the list of reasons to hate nvidia.

The sad part is they are almost a monopoly