What is "rewrite"?
The thing has it's roots in mm/memory.c (and even more so just
<asm/pgtable.h> which really forces the whole structure of the function)
so long ago that it isn't even funny. Coupled with the fact that the
15-line functionality has been changed by various VM/kmap changes (and by
the preempt changes) so many times that it bears little resemblance to
whatever it was before.
It's a question akin to the one whether BSD was based on the original AT&T
UNIX sources and thus under AT&T copyright.
Copyrights simply aren't that black-and-white.
There's also the issue of reasonableness - those fifteen lines can only be
written so many ways, and sure, we could ask NVIDIA & co to write their
own version, but if it bore a surprising similarity to the one in the
kernel, I can't really blame them. Except they'd probably get it wrong,
and they'd _certainly_ be blamed when we introduce something new like the
highmem page tables or preemption stuff.
Linus
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/