HP ASM and kenel tainting

[Domenico Viggiani]

HP reccomends installation of HP System Health Application and Insight Management Agents for RH3:
http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/22093.html
During installation, it asks for breaking GPL license and tainting the
kernel, otherwise some functionalities will be missing. This seems a bad choice to me.
What functionalities will be missing?
Performance data (cpqasm?)?

Thanks in advance
DV

[dirk dierickx]

the linux kernel gets tainted every time a module gets loaded that is not included in the original kernel source.
it means there is no kernel maintainer responsible for it, and probably it also means the module you are trying to load is not GPL compliant and thus not fully open source.
if your kernel starts to act strange and panics all the time, the crash dump will show the developers the kernel was 'tainted' and because of this they will refuse to help you to solve your problem. their reasoning is that they believe the kernel panic/crash will have been caused by your module (as was shown in the past multiple times).

i don't know what functionality these HP agents deliver but i know i do _not_ install them. why do they need to make a kernel module? can't they develop a user-space program/daemon that does the same thing?
for performance analyses i use the standard unix tools and in some cases glance, for hardware monitoring i depend on the kernel itself to report me what is going wrong on the system.

[Domenico Viggiani]

I agree

[Ross Minkov]

For what is worth, the latest release of the hpasm is an application, not a module.

Regards,
Ross

[Domenico Viggiani]

It always asks for tainting the kernel otherwise some functionalities will be missing (cpqasm?).

[Ross Minkov]

Domenico,


Looks like you have a very old version. The name changed from cpqasm to hpasm long time ago. Go to hp.com and download the latest PSP for Linux kit (7.11). 7.20 will come out begining of February.

Regards,
Ross

[Domenico Viggiani]

I have hpasm-7.1.1b-95, I will indagate further tomorrow. Thanks.

[Ross Minkov]

Then you should be all set. You mentioned cpqasm and that confused me into thinking that you had a very old version. cpqasm doesn't exist no more, it's called hpasm now.

I'd recommend installing the whole PSP (ProLiant Support Pack) for Linux if you want to have hpasm on your system. The PSP comes with a install.sh shell script. It will check for prerequisits, install the right drivers, and install the components in the correct order. Note that you need the kernel source code to install the PSP.

Regards,
Ross

[Domenico Viggiani]

In any case, hpasm still asks for tainting the kernel during installation: in fact, after installation, in file /opt/compaq/cma.conf you can read:

notaint yes
exclude cpqasm

I didn't install whole psp because I prefer to have Red Hat drivers, in such a way to update kernels easier and to mantain RH support (for instance: RH supports only tg3 driver, not bcm5700)