Running a mainline kernel on a cellphone

Posted Oct 28, 2015 19:51 UTC (Wed) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613)
In reply to: Running a mainline kernel on a cellphone by tzafrir
Parent article: Running a mainline kernel on a cellphone

> I don't think Debian includes much support beyond mainline (and backported patches).

Currently Debian stable contains 621 patches (+51078 -9753) on top of 3.16.7-ckt11, of which 110 patches (+1750 -1541) are "bugfix" (mostly backports), 462 patches (+47185 -7608) are "features" (mostly drivers), and 49 patches (+2143 -604) are Debian specific.

While most distribution kernels aren't nearly as bad as most vendor kernels, they aren't really mainline either...

Running a mainline kernel on a cellphone

Posted Oct 30, 2015 16:37 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

backports are not a problem since you can only backport something which is is mainline already.

Running a mainline kernel on a cellphone

Posted Oct 31, 2015 3:09 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

The question is: how many of these patches are actually required for the system to be usable? I guess very few.

Running a mainline kernel on a cellphone

Posted Oct 31, 2015 3:31 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

the fact that many people run vanilla kernels on such systems is an indication that in many/most cases the patches are not required (I did so for more than a decade at my last job)

A lot of the 'feature/driver' patches are actually backports of drivers or features that are in newer upstream releases.

Running a mainline kernel on a cellphone

Posted Nov 24, 2015 8:39 UTC (Tue) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link] (3 responses)

Did you know what ckt stands for ?: Canonical Kernel Team.

I assume basically everyone working on the Debian Kernel Team is employed by Canonical and works on both.

Running a mainline kernel on a cellphone

Posted Nov 24, 2015 15:42 UTC (Tue) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (1 responses)

Ben Hutchings doesn't.

Running a mainline kernel on a cellphone

Posted Nov 24, 2015 15:44 UTC (Tue) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

Expanding on this, looking at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam#Ubuntu_Platform_Kernel... , I don't recognise any names in Debian.

Running a mainline kernel on a cellphone

Posted Nov 24, 2015 19:37 UTC (Tue) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

The 'ckt' is there to distinguish Canonical-maintained stable branches from those branches maintained or blessed by Greg K-H. It follows the same rules as other stable branches, though - without anything that's Ubuntu-specific or not upstream.

I'll be taking over maintenance of the 3.16 stable branch next year, likely changing 'ckt' to 'dkt'. (Certainly, it'll have to be something that sorts higher.)