Re: linux-next: manual merge of the kbuild tree with Linus' tree

On Tue, 13 Sep 2016 14:02:57 +1000
Stephen Rothwell [off-list ref] wrote:

Hi Michal,

[For the new cc's, we are discussing the "thin archives" and "link dead
code/data elimination" patches in the kbuild tree.]

On Tue, 13 Sep 2016 09:39:45 +1000 Stephen Rothwell [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016 11:03:08 +0200 Michal Marek [off-list ref] wrote:  

quoted

On 2016-09-12 04:53, Nicholas Piggin wrote:    

quoted

Question, what is the best way to merge dependent patches? Considering
they will need a good amount of architecture testing, I think they will
have to go via arch trees. But it also does not make sense to merge these
kbuild changes upstream first, without having tested them.      

I think it makes sense to merge the kbuild changes via kbuild.git, even
if they are unused and untested. Any follow-up fixes required to enable
the first architecture can go through the respective architecture tree.
Does that sound OK?    

And if you guarantee not to rebase the kbuild tree (or at least the
subset containing these patches), then each of the architecture trees
can just merge your tree (or a tag?) and then implement any necessary
arch dependent changes.  I fixes are necessary, they can also be merged
into the architecture trees.  

Except, of course, the kbuild tree still has the asm EXPORT_SYMBOL
patches that produce warnings on PowerPC :-( (And I am still reverting
the PowerPC specific one of those patches).

I'm working on a better patch to fix that (and to whitelist powerpc's
relocation checks to it does not get blamed for such breakage)
Although no guarantees about that yet.

However some of the enablement and subsequent patches I would like to
merge are quite architecture specific, and I would prefer them to go
via arch trees.

So I would like to see a kbuild branch with these 3 in it, if arch
maintainers (or specifically powerpc) would be willing to pull it in
their -next branches.

Thanks,
Nick