Re: [OT] Unofficial but Supported Kernel Patches

John Weber
2002-05-13T03:06:12Z

Randy.Dunlap wrote:
> On Mon, 13 May 2002, Tomas Szepe wrote:
>
> | > [Randy.Dunlap <rddunlap@osdl.org>, May-12 2002, Sun, 16:32 -0700]
> | >
> | > What I would like is for someone to maintain a set of
> | > "required" patches to each new kernel --
> | > "required" here meaning "these patches are needed for kernel
> | > x.y.z to build or boot cleanly."
> | >
> | > The patchsets would contain only compile/link fixes and
> | > critical logic fixes to release and pre-release kernels.
> |
> | Do you mean something even more
> | "select fault_and_patch from kernel group by release;" than
> | http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/Linux-2.5.html
> | ?
>
> That might be what I suggested, except that I can't find it
> there... That's a status/TODO list.
>

Right now I maintain a kernel tree on linuxhq to which I apply all of
the patches posted on the kernel mailing list (without filtering at
all). I don't think this was very useful, so I was thinking about
simply providing a list of all maintained (but currently not applied)
patches -- things like Rik van Riel's VM, and perhaps put up all of the
patches being developed by Universities and other research institutions
willing to share their stuff.

I didn't think providing patches needed to compile would be very useful,
because it seems that many people do this already (most notably, Alan
Cox does this for Marcelo, and Dave Jones does this for Linus).

I inherited linuxhq.com and would like to make it into something more
useful. Since kernelnewbies does such a wonderful job catering to the
newbies, I figured that linuxhq needed a new niche (and I needed
something funner to do with my time). So please let me know what types
of things you kernel folk would like to see but have no time to do
themselves, and I can accomodate.

Some ideas:

[1] Performance Measurements. (Though I would need some help from the
kernel community to identify which suites are the most useful to run the
kernels against).

[2] Kernel Programming Documentation. This would mostly document the
kernel API, and important kernel data structures, as well as "good
habits" in kernel development -- like "don't use virt_to_bus use
blah,blah,blah". Information like this might be useful to kernel
janitors. (This probably exists already).

[3] Necessary patches for each release.

I will do any and maybe all things that folks find useful...
other suggestions also welcome.