Re: [gentoo-dev] Patches and the 2.4->2.6 move

[Donnie Berkholz]

On Sun, 2003-10-19 at 23:05, Luke-Jr wrote:
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> On Monday 20 October 2003 02:34 am, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > I have a patch that fixes SSE problems on 2.4 kernels. However, on 2.6
> > kernels it breaks OpenGL (applications segfault).
> Shouldn't this be fixed in the kernel, then? What exactly does it actually
> fix?
> >
> > Currently I'm applying this patch if /usr/src/linux is linked to a 2.4
> > kernel at compile-time.
> >
> > This means that if a user emerges xfree when linked to a 2.4 kernel,
> > that user will need to remerge xfree after moving to 2.6 kernels. This
> > takes about 40 minutes on a ‾2GHz x86. However, if this patch is not
> x86 is not specific enough to give 2GHz any meaning. A 2GHz AthlonXP is alot
> faster than an (early) 2GHz Pentium 4.
> > applied, the bug will continue to exist for all Gentoo users on 2.4
> > kernels.
> >
> > My request to you is:
> > 1) Is this acceptable?
> 40 minutes on any kind of 2GHz system would probably mean at least 2 hours for
> me... I'd recommend at least having a local USE flag or variable to enable/
> disable it (default depending on how major the fix is)

A USE flag to disable fixing a bug?
'USE="keep-sse-bugs" emerge xfree' seems a little odd to me.

> > 2) If not, what is a better solution? Dropping the patch entirely? Note
> > that I don't know Mesa/programming well enough to write a patch
> > compatible for both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.
> If a version compatible with both kernels could exist, perhaps asking in some
> related IRC channels could find someone interested in writing such?

I already tried. Response consisted of things similar to "Wait until 2.6
is official, then we will provide a fix for it. Right now we have more
important, relevant things to concentrate on."

Thanks,
Donnie