Kernel RPM question: What if...

Fri Apr 16 18:51:35 UTC 2004

On Fri, Apr 16, 2004 at 01:19:13PM -0400, Martin Stone wrote:
> >start by downloading the 2.4.26 kernel tarbal and change "22" to "26" in
> >the top of the spec for the kernel version.
> >But it'll be painful. I've been doing that kind of work for 3 years now
> >and I estimate it'd take a week to get a decent kernel out of this.
> 
> Ouch.  Certainly I've looked at the spec and entertained thoughts of 
> changing it... But I don't have a week :-(  What about compiling a vanilla 
> kernel.org tree, perhaps with just NPTL applied?  Would that have horrible 
> horrible drawbacks?

A few weeks ago I started working on this, then got sidetracked by other
tasks at work.  Now that a huge fraction of AKPM's -mm tree has been
merged into 2.6.6-rc1, I'm inclined to put it off for a few more weeks, and
just use 2.6 instead.

IMHO, for FC1, it's O(1)-scheduler + futex + NPTL that matters most, if
you want threading, job control, etc., to work properly.  It is also the
biggest hassle to merge.  The rest of the patches in the SRPM are mostly cruft,
much of it backported and "selected" patches from -ac or later 2.4 kernels.
If you find that the Marcelo kernel VM is unacceptable, you might consider
using Rik van Riel's latest rmap patch:

   http://surriel.com/patches/

If you care about NFS issues, you might also want Trond's NFS patches:

   http://www.fys.uio.no/~trondmy/src/Linux-2.4.x/

A few tools that will definitely help:

The latest version of Tim Waugh's patchutils:

   http://cyberelk.net/tim/patchutils/

(FC already includes patchutils, but it's old.)

Neil Brown's wiggle:

  "Wiggle is a program for applying patches that 'patch' cannot
   apply due to conflicting changes in the original."

   http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/wiggle/

Andrew Morton's patch management scripts:

  "This is a description of a bunch of shell scripts which I use for
   managing kernel patches.  They are quite powerful.  They can be used on
   projects other than the linux kernel.  They are easy to use, and fast."

   http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/patch-scripts-0.16/patch-scripts-0.16.tar.gz

It's also nice to have an interactive diff/merge tool.  Emacs has a mode,
or you can look at tkdiff,

   http://sourceforge.net/projects/tkdiff/

or xxdiff,

   http://sourceforge.net/projects/xxdiff/

Regards,

	Bill Rugolsky