On 9/1/2020 9:06 AM, Doug Berger wrote:
On 9/1/2020 7:00 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
[snip]
Sorry for the confusion, but thanks for the reply.
There is functionality that exists in Linus' tree, but it is not the result of a single commit that can be easily backported. I have been unable to find anything in the documentation for submitting a patch to a stable branch that covers this type of submission so I have sent this as an RFC about process rather than a patch.
The upstream commit that ultimately results in the functional change is: commit a32c1c61212d ("arm: simplify detection of memory zone boundaries")
That commit is dependent on other commits that aren't necessary for the stable branches.
In my downstream kernel I would apply the single line patch included in my original email, but it is not appropriate to apply that patch to Linus' tree since the problem does not exist there.
This creates the situation where a simple patch could be applied to a stable branch to improve its stability, but there is not a clear upstream commit to reference.
My best guess at this point is to submit patches to the affected stable branches like the one in my RFC and reference a32c1c61212d as the upstream commit. This would be confusing to anyone that tried to compare the submitted patch with the upstream patch since they wouldn't look at all alike, but the fixes and upstream tags would define the affected range in Linus' tree.
I would appreciate any guidance on how best to handle this kind of situation.
You could submit various patches with [PATCH stable x.y] in the subject to indicate they are targeting a specific stable branch, copy stable@vger.kernel.org as well as all recipients in this email and see if that works.
Not sure if there is a more documented process than that.