Quotes of the week

In the end we all agree GCC does something nasty (and I would call it a bug even), but any solution we find in GCC won't be backportable to earlier releases so you have to deal with the GCC bug for quite some time and devise workarounds in the kernel. You'll hit the bug for all structure fields that share the largest aligned machine word with a bitfield (thus the size depends on the alignment of the full object, not that of the struct containing the bitfield in case that struct is nested inside another more aligned one). This situation should be easily(?) detectable with sparse.

In the embedded market, the biggest problem is that the distributions of BusyBox fail to include the "scripts to control compilation and installation of the executable", which the GPLv2 requires.

As such, users who wish to take a new upstream version of BusyBox and install it on their device are left without any hope of doing so. Most embedded-market GPL enforcement centers around remedying this.

Indeed, enforcement has brought some great successes in this regard. As I wrote on in my blog post on this subject (at http://sfconservancy.org/blog/2012/feb/01/gpl-enforcement/ ), both the OpenWRT and SamyGo firmware modification communities were launched because of source releases yielded in past BusyBox enforcement actions. Getting the "scripts to control compilation and installation of the executable" for those specific devices are what enabled these new upstream firmware projects to get started.