Documentation

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The Linux kernel backports project aims at backporting Linux ''upstream'' device drivers for usage on older kernels. The point of the project is to provide a central mechanism for backporting device drivers for ''any'' subsystem. The backports project shall '''never''' include proprietary drivers and by design does not allow usage of itself with proprietary drivers.
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The Linux kernel backports project aims at backporting Linux ''upstream'' device drivers for usage on older kernels. The point of the project is to provide a central mechanism for backporting device drivers for ''any'' subsystem. The backports project shall '''never''' include proprietary drivers and by design does not allow usage of itself with proprietary drivers. Every backports release has been test compiled ''for usage'' against  all supported kernels, currently 2.6.24 - latest. Always use the latest ''stable'' available release.
  
 
<h2>Release types</h2>
 
<h2>Release types</h2>

Revision as of 09:42, 16 July 2013

The Linux kernel backports project aims at backporting Linux upstream device drivers for usage on older kernels. The point of the project is to provide a central mechanism for backporting device drivers for any subsystem. The backports project shall never include proprietary drivers and by design does not allow usage of itself with proprietary drivers. Every backports release has been test compiled for usage against all supported kernels, currently 2.6.24 - latest. Always use the latest stable available release.

Release types

Both daily snapshots based on linux-next, and stable releases based Linux's stable releases are provided.

Usage guide

Building backports follows the same build mechanism as building the Linux kernel.

# as a user
make menuconfig
make
# as root
make install
# reboot and enjoy

Its understood users may not how to configure the backports package, just like they may not know how to configure the Linux kernel, so a short cut is provided with default configuration files that can be used to only build their drivers / subsystems of interest.

make defconfig-help

If you use this option just use the 'make defconf-option' in replacement for make menuconfig above. For example to compile all DRM drivers:

# as a user
make defconfig-drm
make
# as root
make install

Note that there are only default configuration files written for a few drivers while the project actually backports over 830 device drivers, the reason we have default configuration files for a few drivers is simply because developer have provided a default config options for them. What we really need is a 'make localmodconfig' support but that will take a while given that it involves mapping older kernel configs to newer kernel configs (which likely would be welcomed upstream as well).

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