-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
To: Thomas Goirand <thomas@goirand.fr>
Subject: Re: Applying e1000e patch to the Debian 2.6.26 kernel
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2009 16:26:32 +0100
On Sat, 2009-06-13 at 22:57 +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > We normally backport specific bug fixes and small changes to support new
> > hardware, rather than updating drivers completely. Some driver changes
> > will depend on core changes in the kernel.
> >
> >> (Lenny and a half)?
> >
> > I don't know when that will be released, but it will use an entirely new
> > kernel version.
>
> Do I still have a chance to have it included anytime soon in Debian?
> Because that's the goal... It's really an annoying problem for us.
Unfortunately you have just missed the cut-off for stable update 5.0.2,
but there may be an update to stable-proposed-updates soon after, which
you could then add to your APT sources.
Alternately you can build and install e1000e separately from
e1000.sf.net.
> > It's a large patch combining cleanup and functional changes, which is
> > always hard to review. Please instead identify which of the following
> > changes between 2.6.26 and 2.6.27 are needed:
> >
> > 95b866d e1000e: Fix incorrect debug warning
> > [...]
> > a5136e2 e1000e: allow VLAN devices to use TSO and TCP CSUM offload
> >
> > I've put these individual changes in
> > http://womble.decadent.org.uk/tmp/e1000e-patches/ so you don't need to
> > use git to generate them.
> >
> > Ben.
>
> Thanks a lot for the effort to put this all online for me.
You're welcome. It's actually really easy to extract a patch series
like this from git.
> I got them
> downloaded already locally, you can cleanup and delete these from your
> web server if you want.
>
> I can try the patches one by one, but that can take a long long time if
> I have to recompile a full kernel package each time.
You won't.
> What do you think
> is the best approach for me to make quick tests? Just do a "make
> modules_install" from the linux-source-2.6.26 folder (taken from the
> linux-source-2.6 package), test, apply another patch, test, etc. ?
Once you've configured and built the kernel once, it should be as simple
as:
patch -p1 < some-patch
make # will rebuild just e1000e
rmmod e1000e
insmod drivers/net/e1000e/e1000e.ko
> Also, what's your suggestion to test all this? Make a dichotomy test,
> applying half of the patches, then 1/4, etc. until I can isolate what
> patch(es) are needed? That's my first idea, and shouldn't take too long
> if I can compile the e1000e module only and not the full kernel.
A lot of them are just formatting changes or adaptation to API changes,
and can immediately be discounted. Then you could do what you suggest
(this is commonly called bisection, not dichotomy) over the remainder.
Ben.
--
Ben Hutchings
Never attribute to conspiracy what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
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