Re: GPL vs non-GPL device drivers

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Fri Feb 16 2007 - 18:09:21 EST


linux-os (Dick Johnson) wrote:
Have you tried it recently? Attached is a compressed session

Yes, I have, most recently in 2.6.20. It works fine.

showing 2.6.16.24 compiling fine. Then the same thing is attempted
with 2.6.19. It fails with some "improper configuration" errors.
This script shows that I execute the demanded commands
as 'make oldconfig' and 'make prepare'. Then I try to compile
again resulting, again with the exact same errors.
This was reported on the Linux kernel list and somebody stated,
with much authority BTW, "we don't support out of tree
drivers anymore."

Who told you that? There's documentation in the kernel tree in Documentation/kbuild/modules.txt that describes how to set this up properly.

Looking at your output, without knowing what the makefile contents are, it's impossible to determine what's going wrong. Likely the makefile is trying to do things that the kernel build system should be doing. For a simple module called mymodule with files file1.c, file2.c, file3.c you need only a makefile like this:

ifneq ($(KERNELRELEASE),)

# kbuild part of makefile
obj-m := mymodule.o
mymodule-y := file1.o file2.o file3.o

else

# Normal Makefile
KERNELDIR := /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build
all::
$(MAKE) -C $(KERNELDIR) M=`pwd` $@

endif

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
To email, remove "nospam" from hancockr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/

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