Support for XFS in FreeBSD?

[Terry Lambert]

Zhihui Zhang wrote:
> Suppose someone ported XFS to FreeBSD, then what liscence can you use
> without causing any legal trouble? You must use GNU, but the interface
> code (VFS/vnode, bio, vnode, etc.) are already under BSD liscence.  Can
> one KLD program contain code using different liscences?

Hi.  I'm replying on -chat, just like I warned I would; if you
don't read the archives, you are bound to repeat them.

The answer to the second question is "Yes".

The answer to the first question is that GPL'ed code must remain
GPL'ed, and you cannot mix it in a binary *which you distribute*,
due to clause 6 of the GPL.  As long as the kernel module is
separate from the kernel, once can have a BSD license, and the
other can have a GPL license.

For filesystems, this means you can't make a CDROM that has a BSD
licensed kernel with GPL'ed root FS support in it.  This means,
for XFS, that you can't boot off it by default, unless you rewrite
enough of it to allow the boot loader to read the rest of it as a
kernel loadable module.

-- Terry