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Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

The kernel will mark itself as 'tainted' when something occurs that might be relevant later when investigating problems. Don't worry too much about this, most of the time it's not a problem to run a tainted kernel; the information is mainly of interest once someone wants to investigate some problem, as its real cause might be the event that got the kernel tainted. That's why bug reports from tainted kernels will often be ignored by developers, hence try to reproduce problems with an untainted kernel.

Note the kernel will remain tainted even after you undo what caused the taint (i.e. unload a proprietary kernel module), to indicate the kernel remains not trustworthy. That's also why the kernel will print the tainted state when it notices an internal problem (a 'kernel bug'), a recoverable error ('kernel oops') or a non-recoverable error ('kernel panic') and writes debug information about this to the logs dmesg outputs. It's also possible to check the tainted state at runtime through a file in /proc/.

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Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

Soricidus posted:

not about perl, gas

could have been a dumbass emacs thread

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

Silver Alicorn posted:

wow I never thought someone would make a parody thread for one of mine

😘

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'


hello, comrade

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