Bug#661318: Possibility integrating newer Hyper-V paravirt drivers in squeeze?

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Mathieu Simon wrote:

> But I'm not fully sure about your answer, if I understood you correctly
> this means
> cherry-picking every single related patch from 3.4-rcX to 3.2.(12) let's
> say from gregkh. - Right?

I suppose my answer was less helpful than it could have been. :)
Patches in the Debian kernel repository look like this:

  http://svn.debian.org/viewvc/kernel/dists/sid/linux-2.6/debian/patches/

The baseline for the current sid kernel is gregkh's 3.2.y kernel.
When patches meet the criteria described in Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt,
we can get them applied to 3.2.y and share their maintenance with
others (no patch in the kernel repository needed in that case).

For miscellaneous fixes not in the -stable tree, all that is needed is
a list of commit ids corresponding to patches' appearance in linus's
"master" or some tree that feeds into it.  Driver backports are also
often treated this way, and it's probably the right thing to do for
your case.

I do not think one big patch is ever acceptable for this, since it
would make it way too hard to back out one patch while debugging.

However, in theory it is even better (maybe "the kernel team is
happiest" was a stretch) if a maintained version of the driver
backport can be shared between distros and others using the same basic
kernel/driver version combination.  This is roughly speaking the way
graphics drivers are maintained in squeeze: there is a
"linux-2.6.32.y-drm33.z" tree that keeps track of fixes that were
discovered to keep the graphics drivers from Linux 2.6.33.y working
well against a 2.6.32.y kernel.  That is fussy work and a long-term
commitment, so it was probably not the best answer to "what does
Debian prefer".

Upshot: if you send a list of relevant commit ids for commits that
are not in 3.2.y, that's a good start, and we can try applying them
and go from there.  (If it's just the list output by

	git log --no-merges --oneline v3.2..origin/master \
		-- drivers/hv drivers/staging/hv

then the kernel team could just use that, but I think you mentioned
needing a few more.)

Thanks much and sorry for the lack of clarity.
Jonathan