I ran lsmod command on an emulator for a board, and the output is Not tainted . What does that mean ?
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Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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user2799508
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It's an indicator of "of kernel purity", read more here, http://askubuntu.com/questions/248470/what-does-the-kernel-taint-value-mean – X Tian Feb 25 '14 at 11:22
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A running instance of the Linux kernel becomes “tainted” when something dodgy happens. The kernel boots in non-tainted state, and becomes tainted if one such dodgy thing happens. The full list of dodgy events is documented in sysctl/kernel.txt, and the kernel's current taint state can be read from /proc/sys/kernel/tainted (0 means not tainted).
The most common reason for tainting is loaded a module which declares a license other than GPL. All official kernel modules have a GPL license. Unofficial or experimental drivers that declare themselves as such also mark the kernel as tainted. Some internal kernel errors or hardware errors are recoverable, so the system keeps going, but mark the kernel as tainted.
The taint has no effect on the running kernel, but shows up in various traces and logs, including the output of lsmod. The social effect of taint is that kernel maintainers often won't help you if you're running a tainted kernel: you chose to do something dodgy and you have to live with the consequences.
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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But I think the problem here is that the kernel is not tainted respectively /proc/sys/kernel/tainted is 0 and lsmod prints "Not tainted". It's correct that it's not tainted but why does lsmod print "Not tainted"? Is this the default output if no modules are loaded? – Simon Rechermann Apr 11 '23 at 12:19
