Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] kernel unit testing

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 07:56:43PM -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> Overall, I can not imagine that it is even possible to use quilt trees as basis
> for development in a company with if active kernel development, even more so
> if a large number of engineers and/or a number of branches are involved.
> Sure, the QCOM example may be extreme, but do you really think that writing
> those 2.5M LOC would have been possible if QCOM had used Quilt trees instead
> of git ? Using Quilt would for sure have prevented them from writing those
> 2.5M LOC, but then there would be nothing. That doesn't sound like a feasible
> alternative either.

It is possible, look at the Red Hat and SuSE kernel development teams.
Yes, in the end, most of the patches are backports from upstream, but
during new releases they use quilt for all of their work, adding and
removing and updating patches all the time.

There are the usual merge issues with doing that, but for an SoC, I
don't think that would be all that hard given that almost all patches
are driver/subsystem-specific and don't touch other places.

It does take a better calibre of developer to do this type of thing,
that might be a harder thing to deal with at some SoC vendors :)

thanks,

greg k-h