Tainted kernels:
Some oops reports contain the string 'Tainted: ' after the program
-counter, this indicates that the kernel has been tainted by some
-mechanism. The string is followed by a series of position sensitive
+counter. This indicates that the kernel has been tainted by some
+mechanism. The string is followed by a series of position-sensitive
characters, each representing a particular tainted value.
1: 'G' if all modules loaded have a GPL or compatible license, 'P' if
MODULE_LICENSE or with a MODULE_LICENSE that is not recognised by
insmod as GPL compatible are assumed to be proprietary.
- 2: 'F' if any module was force loaded by insmod -f, ' ' if all
+ 2: 'F' if any module was force loaded by "insmod -f", ' ' if all
modules were loaded normally.
3: 'S' if the oops occurred on an SMP kernel running on hardware that
- hasn't been certified as safe to run multiprocessor.
- Currently this occurs only on various Athlons that are not
- SMP capable.
+ hasn't been certified as safe to run multiprocessor.
+ Currently this occurs only on various Athlons that are not
+ SMP capable.
+
+ 4: 'R' if a module was force unloaded by "rmmod -f", ' ' if all
+ modules were unloaded normally.
+
+ 5: 'M' if any processor has reported a Machine Check Exception,
+ ' ' if no Machine Check Exceptions have occurred.
+
+ 6: 'B' if a page-release function has found a bad page reference or
+ some unexpected page flags.
The primary reason for the 'Tainted: ' string is to tell kernel
debuggers if this is a clean kernel or if anything unusual has
-occurred. Tainting is permanent, even if an offending module is
-unloading the tainted value remains to indicate that the kernel is not
+occurred. Tainting is permanent: even if an offending module is
+unloaded, the tainted value remains to indicate that the kernel is not
trustworthy.