Re: [gentoo-mips] SGI Octane kernel patch available

[Alex Deucher]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 8:00 PM, Joshua Kinard <kumba@g.o> wrote:
> On 09/22/2014 10:44, Alex Deucher wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 5:47 AM, Joshua Kinard <kumba@g.o> wrote:
>>> I've made a unified patch against linux-3.16.0 available to get Octane working
>>> for anyone with such a machine again.  I still have to re-work the patchset for
>>> mips-sources to include this, but that will take a while longer.  I'll try to
>>> get stages uploaded in a few days someplace as well, along with the minimal
>>> netboot initramfs.
>>>
>>> Full info is available here on the forums:
>>> https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7621340.html
>>>
>>
>> For review purposes and probably a better chance of spotting bugs, it
>> would be nice if you could break you patch up into manageable pieces
>> and send then out as git patches.  E.g., precursor patches, core
>> support patches, individual new driver patches.
>>
>> Alex
>
> The goal is to eventually get this into linux-mips upstream by breaking it up
> into separate patches for review.  Right now, though, I just wanted to put
> something out there for others to hack on and maybe improve things.  There are
> still some drivers that Octane uses that can work on other systems that have
> problems on those other systems.  Specifically, the IOC3 metadriver.  That
> doesn't work on IP27 right now, and that's the bare minimum that has to be
> fixed before I can send things upstream, since upstream won't accept two
> different variants of IOC3 code for two different systems.

IMHO, it's easier for others to contribute and improve things if you
break the patch up.  Some one familiar with the ioc3 hw may take the
time to look at a few ioc3 patches, but quickly get discouraged trying
to sift through a huge patch that touches tons of unrelated things.
You might also want to provide a git tree so others can easily grab
the changes.

Just my 2 cents.

Alex