Arch Linux

germoney

Member

Registered: 2018-08-31

Posts: 17

Why did the patch-setup of Arch's "linux" kernel get changed in 6.5.4?

With the following commit, the setup of patches for Arch's "linux" kernel got changed:
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … 7e3fe50cea

Instead of having a specific branch on top of each release of the stable kernel, patches are now merged into a single (signed) patch-file, which is then uploaded to GitHub releases. Individual branches do not exist anymore.
https://github.com/archlinux/linux/releases
https://github.com/archlinux/linux/branches

So my question is, why was this done? According to the comment on Arch's GL instance of the PKGBUILD commit linked above, the same setup is used for the Zen kernel, which of course has a lot of more patches.

And this is exactly why I'm asking this question. Merging all the commits into a single patch-file without any commit messages describing the changes and intentions makes it really difficult to understand. This makes it also difficult to cherry-pick from Arch's kernel. The Zen kernel still has all its branches, but the default Arch kernel repo does not.

See the 6.5.5-arch1 patch-set for example. It's only a few commits merged into one patch-file, and it's already hard to follow.

curl -sSL https://github.com/archlinux/linux/releases/download/v6.5.5-arch1/linux-v6.5.5-arch1.patch.zst | zstd -d | less

Am I missing something? Are the individual commits maintained somewhere else where people can have a look? Yes, I am aware that the patches are usually taken ahead of the releases of the stable kernel, with a few exceptions, so this all is still pretty vanilla, but the issue I've described still remains.

Was this announced and discussed somewhere? What are the actual benefits? If the reason is purely for simplicity of maintenance for Arch's kernel maintainer(s), then please don't forget about users wanting to have a look, for whatever reasons.

I couldn't find any threads on the bug tracker and I didn't manage to find anything here on the forums, so apologies if this was asked somewhere else already.

Thanks.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 18,877

Re: Why did the patch-setup of Arch's "linux" kernel get changed in 6.5.4?

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/71400

You can find the individual commits from the release or tag then view the tree for that object then switch to commits so for the latest release that produces https://github.com/archlinux/linux/commits/v6.5.5-arch1

Last edited by loqs (2023-09-24 11:44:52)

germoney

Member

Registered: 2018-08-31

Posts: 17

Re: Why did the patch-setup of Arch's "linux" kernel get changed in 6.5.4?

Thanks.

No idea how I could've missed the tags on GH. Embarrassing...

What's asked for in the linked bug tracker thread from 2021 makes sense, at least when you build only once from the PKGBUILD. Building again after updating multiple times will however cause whole tarballs being downloaded each time, while when pulling from git, it'll only be the diffs that get downloaded between new versions. So yeah, I don't fully agree with those changes for the sake of saving network traffic, but I'm of course not in the position to make any claims.