[CentOS] maintaining patches across releases

[Akemi Yagi]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Keith Keller
<kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have what might be a foolish question about patching packages.  I am
> not sure exactly how to phrase the question, so please follow up if it
> seems as though I'm not being clear.
>
> I was looking at this bug which my machines are currently experiencing:
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=883905
>
> The proposed patch is literally one new line in the XFS codebase.  So
> since the patch is so straightforward, I had a crazy idea that I would
> build my own kernel with this patch, and test it out to see if it
> worked.  (It's been many years since I built my own kernel, so that
> would be an adventure in and of itself.)

You may want to check this out:

http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=6087

My understanding is that "There is no side effect other than the load.
There are not performance issues with the ailds behaving like this."
Is this not the case ?

> My worry would be, I would want to make sure that I propagated this
> patch every time I updated the kernel package.  Is this something
> others do regularly?  If so, is there a standard way of managing
> the process of applying one's own patches to a series of source
> packages, and being able to re-patch and rebuild updated packages?
>
> I'm guessing that I just need to build xfs.ko.  Are there any gotchas
> beyond the wiki entry on building your own kernel modules?  That page
> seems to target CentOS 5, not 6, but I imagine the process is quite
> similar.
>
> --keith

The wiki article:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/BuildingKernelModules

may not be quite up-to-date in that it does not reflect the kernel
version for CentOS 6 (2.6.32). But the principle is there. For
building your own modules, you can also download one of the kmod
packages from ELRepo and study how it's done.

Akemi