what does this "tainted kernel" mean

[mol-general@lists.maconlinux.org]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2002 at 11:05:29AM +0200, Markus Tarköy wrote:
> I recently installed YDL 2.3 on my PPC which went pretty OK. As I was
> trying then to play around with MOL I ran into problems. Following the
> guide at maconlinux.org I issued some commands first to check my
> installation.
> 
> When I ran startmol --loadonly as root, I got the following warnings:
> Loading Mac-on-Linux kernel module:
> /usr/lib/mol/0.9.63/modules/2.4.19-pre8/mol.o
> Warning: loading /usr/lib/mol/0.9.63/modules/2.4.19-pre8/mol.o will
> taint the kernel: forced load
> Loading SheepNet ethernet kernel module:
> /usr/lib/mol/0.9.63/modules/2.4.19-pre8/sheep_net.o
> Warning: loading /usr/lib/mol/0.9.63/modules/2.4.19-pre8/sheep_net.o
> will taint the kernel: forced load
> 
> So what does this "tainted kernel" thing mean? When I ran startmol --test
> it displayed "test successful".

In this case, the "tainted" warning means that the kernel
the mol module compiled against is not the currently
running one (it is /sbin/insmod that outputs this warning).

Or... with mol 0.9.62 or eariler, the mol modules did not have
to GPL copyright blurb which will result in a "tainted" warning
message when these modules are loaded. If you are running
a pre-release version of 0.9.63, that might be the case here.
In particular since mol should not allow a kernel version
mismatch unless it is passed the -a switch.

/Samuel