Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751825Ab0KINvt (ORCPT ); Tue, 9 Nov 2010 08:51:49 -0500 Received: from mail-bw0-f46.google.com ([209.85.214.46]:37000 "EHLO mail-bw0-f46.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751223Ab0KINvs (ORCPT ); Tue, 9 Nov 2010 08:51:48 -0500 Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2010 13:51:29 +0000 From: Wolfgang Spraul To: OpenWrt Development List Cc: Arnaud Lacombe , Greg KH , Elvis Dowson , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Anca Emanuel Subject: Re: [OpenWrt-Devel] Forked android kernel development from linux kernel mainline Message-ID: <20101109135129.GE14380@asus.wolf> References: <01784A8B-36A0-4E8A-9729-23C2B19351F8@mac.com> <20101107155757.GA13736@kroah.com> <201011091427.09050.florian@openwrt.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <201011091427.09050.florian@openwrt.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2589 Lines: 53 Florian and Greg, > > Just a small comment to say that Android is not the only one (but > > certainly the most visible, and thus easiest to bash on) not making > > effort to get their stuff in mainline. OpenWRT people are also > > maintaining their fork of the kernel, without even using git, and not > > contributing much to mainline (I'm certainly mistaken on that last > > comment). > > You are a bit rude and mistaking at the same time. We did contribute back TI > AR7, Mikrotik RB532, RDC R-321x, IXP4xx to name a few and a lot of various > patches on different related projects. I'm speaking as a bystander here, but Lars-Peter Clausen took an enormous effort to get an entire new SoC, Ingenic's XBurst 4740, into mainline Linux, using the OpenWrt patch system as his development/staging area. A lot of that work was merged mainline in 2.6.36, some more is coming. I think the mainline quality standards are high (nothing wrong with that), so it's not easy to get stuff up to that level. And there is not exactly much of a pull force either, if I may say so. I have worked on numerous projects, platforms and build systems over the years. The OpenWrt people and tools are some of the most upstream oriented and best ways to get upstream I have seen. The next big thing I will try to lend a helping hand to will be the kernel.org inclusion of the Milkymist SoC. A fairly clean and constantly re-based kernel is here https://github.com/tmatsuya/linux-2.6 Linux 2.6.36+ is already booting, now it 'only' needs to go mainline ;-) http://lists.milkymist.org/pipermail/devel-milkymist.org/2010-October/000979.html Anybody mainline care to pull directly? That would be awesome. Otherwise my next best bet would be to go to OpenWrt first, hack it into SVN patches, then go from there. At least OpenWrt cares a lot to produce buildable and bootable images at any time, that's an excellent way to go for bigger and better things. >From the perspective of someone looking from mainline, I can understand the frustration over not seeing a git repo that one can pull from at any time. But from the outside it looks a bit different. Patches are sometimes forced to live outside mainline for a long long time, years. And in those years the way OpenWrt is dealing with patches is still a very effective system to avoid bitrot. my 2c, Wolfgang -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/