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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

I’m confused about their mention of Go. The Linux implementation of WireGuard is written in C - https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-linux

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This is a C implementation that is distinct from the Linux kernel implementation. The most common WireGuard desktop implementation is in Go; the kernel commit is comparing their C WireGuard to the Go desktop WireGuard.

There's a portable userspace implementation written in Go, for places where a kernel driver is unavailable at present.

OpenBSD doesn't want any GPL code, so they couldn't just port the Linux kernel module.

The OpenBSD kernel module is also written in C: http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/net/if_wg.c...

But the code looks quite different from https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-linux/tree/drivers/net/wireg...

This has nothing to do with licensing. OpenBSD is a different kernel, so different code. Having written the Linux code, I relicensed any similarities between the two to make it amenable to OpenBSD, and remove any doubt about status.

Is it possible to create kernel modules for both OpenBSD and Linux with common code that's licensed appropriately? Something like a library with two kernel API glue layers, one for Linux GPLed and one for OpenBSD.

My impression about the goal of Wireguard (mind you, I haven't looked at the code) is that it's to be as simple as possible, reusing as much of the primitives the OS offers without reinventing the wheel.

That goal may be antithetical to a single codebase supporting multiple (possibly very dissimilar) operating systems.

It's interesting to compare this approach to the approach taken by OpenSSH (and its openssh-portable variant). One has code specific to each OS, the other one has one canonical codebase for one OS + patches addressing compatibility with other OSes. IMHO mostly due to the difference in complexity of each project.

Might be a good idea to not use the phrase "kernel module" since it means something very specific (code you insmod on linux, kldload on fbsd and so on) which isn't supported on OpenBSD since 2014.

This has nothing to do with the GPLv2 licensing of the code in the Linux kernel.

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