Documentation

Kernel backports project

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

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).