Maintaining a custom out-of-tree patched Debian kernel for specific hardware (an update)

[Kumar Appaiah <a.kumar@alumni.iitm.ac.in>]

Dear Debian Developers,

This is a follow-up to
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2018/01/msg00461.html
(Message-ID: <20180122140840.GA4580@odessa>).

Some good people in the thread above mentioned that maintaing a forked
kernel merely for two one-line patches is too much. I disagreed
initially, but then, found that in recent kernels, one of the patches
is not needed. For the other (related to rfkill), I managed to make a
custom DKMS package with the patch included here:

https://github.com/kumanna/rfkill-dkms

Luckily, this seems to work.

So, my customization of an official Debian ISO consists of:

- Grabbing a stable DVD ISO.

- Replacing the installed kernel with a more recent one from backports
  (should be unnecessary for testing) and ensuring that it gets chosen
  via preseed.

- Adding custom scripts for enabling sound and bluetooth (preseeding)
  grabbed from https://github.com/sundarnagarajan/rdp-thinbook-linux

- Adding the non-free firmware that is needed for wireless and sound.

- Adding my custom patched rfkill DKMS package and ensuring that
  linux-headers is also installed, so that I can use the
  preseed/late_command to build the DKMS module.

My current (hack) is documented here:
https://gitlab.com/kumanna/debian-installer-rdp

I intend moving this to salsa.debian.org and improving this
customization.

With thanks to the previous responders, I wanted to know if there are
other things I should keep in mind. Let me know if I have missed any details.

Thanks.

Kumar
-- 
We apologize for the inconvenience, but we'd still like yout to test out
this kernel.
		-- Linus Torvalds, announcing another kernel patch