Re: Akmod Built Nvidia Module Tainting the Kernel at Boot Time

[Jonathan Billings]

On Jul 5, 2022, at 18:55, Stephen Morris  wrote:
> [   13.973636] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.

It’s this line where the kernel notes why it is tainted.  Somewhere in the nvidia kmod C code, there is a line that looks like this:

MODULE_LICENSE("NVIDIA");

The kernel will print out the aforementioned kernel message if it isn’t one of the open licenses defined in the kernel.  There’s more about tainted kernels here:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/tainted-kernels.html

There are a variety of reasons why the kernel would be tainted, but in this case it is because a proprietary kernel module was loaded. It doesn’t have anything to do with signed kernel modules or secure boot.