Many source files in the tree are missing licensing information, which
makes it harder for compliance tools to determine the correct license.
By default all files without license information are under the default
license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2.
Update the files which contain no license information with the 'GPL-2.0'
SPDX license identifier. The SPDX identifier is a legally binding
shorthand, which can be used instead of the full boiler plate text.
This patch is based on work done by Thomas Gleixner and Kate Stewart and
Philippe Ombredanne.
How this work was done:
Patches were generated and checked against linux-4.14-rc6 for a subset of
the use cases:
- file had no licensing information it it.
- file was a */uapi/* one with no licensing information in it,
- file was a */uapi/* one with existing licensing information,
Further patches will be generated in subsequent months to fix up cases
where non-standard license headers were used, and references to license
had to be inferred by heuristics based on keywords.
The analysis to determine which SPDX License Identifier to be applied to
a file was done in a spreadsheet of side by side results from of the
output of two independent scanners (ScanCode & Windriver) producing SPDX
tag:value files created by Philippe Ombredanne. Philippe prepared the
base worksheet, and did an initial spot review of a few 1000 files.
The 4.13 kernel was the starting point of the analysis with 60,537 files
assessed. Kate Stewart did a file by file comparison of the scanner
results in the spreadsheet to determine which SPDX license identifier(s)
to be applied to the file. She confirmed any determination that was not
immediately clear with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.
Criteria used to select files for SPDX license identifier tagging was:
- Files considered eligible had to be source code files.
- Make and config files were included as candidates if they contained >5
lines of source
- File already had some variant of a license header in it (even if <5
lines).
All documentation files were explicitly excluded.
The following heuristics were used to determine which SPDX license
identifiers to apply.
- when both scanners couldn't find any license traces, file was
considered to have no license information in it, and the top level
COPYING file license applied.
For non */uapi/* files that summary was:
SPDX license identifier # files
---------------------------------------------------|-------
GPL-2.0 11139
and resulted in the first patch in this series.
If that file was a */uapi/* path one, it was "GPL-2.0 WITH
Linux-syscall-note" otherwise it was "GPL-2.0". Results of that was:
SPDX license identifier # files
---------------------------------------------------|-------
GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note 930
and resulted in the second patch in this series.
- if a file had some form of licensing information in it, and was one
of the */uapi/* ones, it was denoted with the Linux-syscall-note if
any GPL family license was found in the file or had no licensing in
it (per prior point). Results summary:
SPDX license identifier # files
---------------------------------------------------|------
GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note 270
GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 169
((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-2-Clause) 21
((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) 17
LGPL-2.1+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 15
GPL-1.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 14
((GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) 5
LGPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 4
LGPL-2.1 WITH Linux-syscall-note 3
((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT) 3
((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND MIT) 1
and that resulted in the third patch in this series.
- when the two scanners agreed on the detected license(s), that became
the concluded license(s).
- when there was disagreement between the two scanners (one detected a
license but the other didn't, or they both detected different
licenses) a manual inspection of the file occurred.
- In most cases a manual inspection of the information in the file
resulted in a clear resolution of the license that should apply (and
which scanner probably needed to revisit its heuristics).
- When it was not immediately clear, the license identifier was
confirmed with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.
- If there was any question as to the appropriate license identifier,
the file was flagged for further research and to be revisited later
in time.
In total, over 70 hours of logged manual review was done on the
spreadsheet to determine the SPDX license identifiers to apply to the
source files by Kate, Philippe, Thomas and, in some cases, confirmation
by lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.
Kate also obtained a third independent scan of the 4.13 code base from
FOSSology, and compared selected files where the other two scanners
disagreed against that SPDX file, to see if there was new insights. The
Windriver scanner is based on an older version of FOSSology in part, so
they are related.
Thomas did random spot checks in about 500 files from the spreadsheets
for the uapi headers and agreed with SPDX license identifier in the
files he inspected. For the non-uapi files Thomas did random spot checks
in about 15000 files.
In initial set of patches against 4.14-rc6, 3 files were found to have
copy/paste license identifier errors, and have been fixed to reflect the
correct identifier.
Additionally Philippe spent 10 hours this week doing a detailed manual
inspection and review of the 12,461 patched files from the initial patch
version early this week with:
- a full scancode scan run, collecting the matched texts, detected
license ids and scores
- reviewing anything where there was a license detected (about 500+
files) to ensure that the applied SPDX license was correct
- reviewing anything where there was no detection but the patch license
was not GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note to ensure that the applied
SPDX license was correct
This produced a worksheet with 20 files needing minor correction. This
worksheet was then exported into 3 different .csv files for the
different types of files to be modified.
These .csv files were then reviewed by Greg. Thomas wrote a script to
parse the csv files and add the proper SPDX tag to the file, in the
format that the file expected. This script was further refined by Greg
based on the output to detect more types of files automatically and to
distinguish between header and source .c files (which need different
comment types.) Finally Greg ran the script using the .csv files to
generate the patches.
Reviewed-by: Kate Stewart <kstewart@linuxfoundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Philippe Ombredanne <pombredanne@nexb.com>
Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Long long ago the kernel log buffer was a buffered stream of bytes, very
much like stdio in user space. It supported log levels by scanning the
stream and noticing the log level markers at the beginning of each line,
but if you wanted to print a partial line in multiple chunks, you just
did multiple printk() calls, and it just automatically worked.
Except when it didn't, and you had very confusing output when different
lines got all mixed up with each other. Then you got fragment lines
mixing with each other, or with non-fragment lines, because it was
traditionally impossible to tell whether a printk() call was a
continuation or not.
To at least help clarify the issue of continuation lines, we added a
KERN_CONT marker back in 2007 to mark continuation lines:
4749252776 ("printk: add KERN_CONT annotation").
That continuation marker was initially an empty string, and didn't
actuall make any semantic difference. But it at least made it possible
to annotate the source code, and have check-patch notice that a printk()
didn't need or want a log level marker, because it was a continuation of
a previous line.
To avoid the ambiguity between a continuation line that had that
KERN_CONT marker, and a printk with no level information at all, we then
in 2009 made KERN_CONT be a real log level marker which meant that we
could now reliably tell the difference between the two cases.
5fd29d6ccb ("printk: clean up handling of log-levels and newlines")
and we could take advantage of that to make sure we didn't mix up
continuation lines with lines that just didn't have any loglevel at all.
Then, in 2012, the kernel log buffer was changed to be a "record" based
log, where each line was a record that has a loglevel and a timestamp.
You can see the beginning of that conversion in commits
e11fea92e1 ("kmsg: export printk records to the /dev/kmsg interface")
7ff9554bb5 ("printk: convert byte-buffer to variable-length record buffer")
with a number of follow-up commits to fix some painful fallout from that
conversion. Over all, it took a couple of months to sort out most of
it. But the upside was that you could have concurrent readers (and
writers) of the kernel log and not have lines with mixed output in them.
And one particular pain-point for the record-based kernel logging was
exactly the fragmentary lines that are generated in smaller chunks. In
order to still log them as one recrod, the continuation lines need to be
attached to the previous record properly.
However the explicit continuation record marker that is actually useful
for this exact case was actually removed in aroundm the same time by commit
61e99ab8e3 ("printk: remove the now unnecessary "C" annotation for KERN_CONT")
due to the incorrect belief that KERN_CONT wasn't meaningful. The
ambiguity between "is this a continuation line" or "is this a plain
printk with no log level information" was reintroduced, and in fact
became an even bigger pain point because there was now the whole
record-level merging of kernel messages going on.
This patch reinstates the KERN_CONT as a real non-empty string marker,
so that the ambiguity is fixed once again.
But it's not a plain revert of that original removal: in the four years
since we made KERN_CONT an empty string again, not only has the format
of the log level markers changed, we've also had some usage changes in
this area.
For example, some ACPI code seems to use KERN_CONT _together_ with a log
level, and now uses both the KERN_CONT marker and (for example) a
KERN_INFO marker to show that it's an informational continuation of a
line.
Which is actually not a bad idea - if the continuation line cannot be
attached to its predecessor, without the log level information we don't
know what log level to assign to it (and we traditionally just assigned
it the default loglevel). So having both a log level and the KERN_CONT
marker is not necessarily a bad idea, but it does mean that we need to
actually iterate over potentially multiple markers, rather than just a
single one.
Also, since KERN_CONT was still conceptually needed, and encouraged, but
didn't actually _do_ anything, we've also had the reverse problem:
rather than having too many annotations it has too few, and there is bit
rot with code that no longer marks the continuation lines with the
KERN_CONT marker.
So this patch not only re-instates the non-empty KERN_CONT marker, it
also fixes up the cases of bit-rot I noticed in my own logs.
There are probably other cases where KERN_CONT will be needed to be
added, either because it is new code that never dealt with the need for
KERN_CONT, or old code that has bitrotted without anybody noticing.
That said, we should strive to avoid the need for KERN_CONT. It does
result in real problems for logging, and should generally not be seen as
a good feature. If we some day can get rid of the feature entirely,
because nobody does any fragmented printk calls, that would be lovely.
But until that point, let's at mark the code that relies on the hacky
multi-fragment kernel printk's. Not only does it avoid the ambiguity,
it also annotates code as "maybe this would be good to fix some day".
(That said, particularly during single-threaded bootup, the downsides of
KERN_CONT are very limited. Things get much hairier when you have
multiple threads going on and user level reading and writing logs too).
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Now that all KERN_<LEVEL> uses are prefixed with ASCII SOH, there is no
need for a KERN_CONT. Keep it backward compatible by adding #define
KERN_CONT ""
Reduces kernel image size a thousand bytes.
Signed-off-by: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Instead of "<.>", use an ASCII SOH for the KERN_<LEVEL> prefix initiator.
This saves 1 byte per printk, thousands of bytes in a normal kernel.
No output changes are produced as vprintk_emit converts these uses to
"<.>".
Signed-off-by: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Separate the printk.h file into 2 pieces so the definitions can be used in
asm files.
Signed-off-by: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Greg Kroah-Hartman