Re: linux-next: build failure after merge of the mm-hotfixes tree

Andrew Morton
2026-04-21T14:28:23Z

On Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:20:25 +0200 "David Hildenbrand (Arm)" <david@kernel.org> wrote:

> On 4/21/26 16:17, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:42:29 +0200 "David Hildenbrand (Arm)" <david@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> >> On 4/21/26 15:34, Mark Brown wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> And similarly for the mm-nonmm-unstable tree.
> >>
> >> I think Andrew uses the hotfixes tree as the base for the -unstable
> >> trees. So anything that ends up in there gets fast-tracked into -next.
> >> Not good :(
> >
> > Always been this way. The expectation is that a hotfix is small,
> > time-sensitive and fixes something which is broken in linux-next. It's
> > exceedingly rare for a hotfix to break the build!
>
> Yeah, it's also exceedingly rare for my cross-compilations to not catch
> that :(
>
> Even the build bots did not catch that on my private github branches.

And I'm presently away from my build machine.

> > I'll drop this patch.
>
> I'll resend v2 later. Maybe we can let that rest in mm-new for 2 days to
> get some build coverage.

OK.

I *could* start giving hotfixes a run in mm-new first, although

- it'll add a few days additional latency (which people sometimes get
upset about)

- haven't really seen a need for this before

- coverage is mm-new is poor - for example, this error probably
wouldn't have been found until Mark grabbed the patch via mm-hotfixes.