On 02/22/2018 01:27 PM, Stephen Morris wrote:
From the responses I am getting it seems that the meaning of 'taints the kernel' has morphed into something else?
Here's my understanding of it from when I had nVidia graphics. Let's say that you have a kerneloops, but haven't rebooted. Your kernel is considered to be tainted by that because anybody trying to recreate a later kernel issue can't properly know what state the kernel was in. If you have any binary modules loaded that are closed source, your kernel is considered tainted because there's no way to troubleshoot that module or find out if it's involved. (My personal opinion is that in this case somebody should try to recreate the issue with an untainted kernel to see if that module's involved, but I guess that's too much bother.)