Tutorails for backporting kernel patches
 

Hi,

Recently I came to know there is a feature that is going to available in Kernel 2.6.19, but I guess I am not willing to upgrade my current kernel from 2.6.17 to 2.6.19. But I want that functionality. So many people suggested me to take the patches of 2.6.19 and backport it to 2.6.17. Now how can I do that? I tried searching on goole, "backporting patches linux" but nothing meaningful came out.

I would really appreciate if I can get an example of backporting a sample patch or a good tutorial which mentions step-by-step how to backport?

Thanks

It depends if the change is big or not. If it's not that big, you may be able to get the orginal patch the author of the change submitted. With luck, you may be able to simply apply it to your kernel version. It just depends which subsystem the patch is.

Well yes I understand what you are saying, but the case which you mentioned hardly happens in the world of linux because of it;'s dynamic nature. That's why I was hoping to learn about it and after backporting I can produce the patches as is done by the Linux Kernel developers.I am sure I won't be required to deal with Kernel programming in near future but I think I should know backporting and then release my own backported patches for my own kernel version.

Thanks for your reply though.

The code is dynamic, but there are huge parts that get very small changes (or none at all) between many versions. The whole code is very big, so it may seem that there are so many changes per 100 lines. It's not exactly that way.