Well, the explanation is I'm involved in development of a system which uses a feature of the Linux kernel which RedHat deliberately patched away in RedHat 8. This patch, which was written by a coworker of mine, ignores the fact that the symbol for the variable isn't exported, finds it anyway, and essentially patches it in. It is, at many levels, wrong.

That said, I'm bitter enough about the whole thing that I ended up making that offer. Or perhaps promise, depending on how you look at it.