[CentOS] Correct way to provide kernel patch

Mon Mar 16 20:24:50 UTC 2009
Chris Miller <centos at scratchspace.com>

I work with a USB device that is intercepted by the USB HID driver.
In order to stop this behavior, the device needs to be added to the
HID blacklist (hid-core.c) and a custom kernel needs to be compiled.

If I create a CentOS specific patch, it appears I need to create the
patch against an already patched source tree (i.e. after running
rpmbuild -bp) because other patches exist that add items to the
blacklist that would break my diff patch. Seems like this would be a
never ending battle as new patches get added to new kernels.

What's the correct way to get this device added to the kernel? Do I
submit my patch to the CentOS dev team, to the kernel.org folks, or
both? What's the timeline (if accepted) to actually seeing this in a
production kernel? On the CentOS kernel build how-to, the kABI fixes
won't make it into CentOS until 5.4, and 5.3 hasn't been released yet.

Thanks in advance...

Regards,
	Chris