The radxa bsp kernel patches : from 5.10.67 to 5.10.123

gnattu · October 8, 2022, 1:07am

Probably it would be nice to have a list for what patches as been dropped. We cannot know what Rockchip did but at least our self-made patches could have some record like this?

willy · October 8, 2022, 9:06am

You could have known if they rebased. Since they merged, all the patches are there, it’s just that conflicts were not correctly resolved and cannot be spotted anymore once the commit is created, by definition. That’s why we’re saying that what they’ve done is a terrible unauditable and unfixable mess.

AkulaMD · October 8, 2022, 11:51am

Isn’t 5.10 is a bit too old now?

gnattu · October 8, 2022, 1:48pm

If you are talking about the upstream 5.10, then it’s an LTS kernel with enough vendor interest and has extended support till Dec, 2026. It is “old” because it is initially released about 2 years ago, but it is still receiving updates.

But the thing is that we are using a vendor kernel AND a lot of patches getting dropped to make vendor(rockchip)'s downstream patch work, and we will not receive updates as soon as a new upstream 5.10.x is released, and this would be the real problem to make our kernel “old”.

tkaiser · October 28, 2022, 9:22am

Now even Radxa uses the 5.10.110 branch (merged in some Google kernel stuff) FriendlyELEC ships with since months…

darkmode · February 1, 2023, 6:45am

Do you mind explaining what this means in terms of diverging from mainline as discussed above?

gnattu · February 1, 2023, 6:30am

willy:

That’s not at all what I observed. It was forked at 2.6.32 and then new stable versions were merged in and conflicts resolved by hand. Many many many bugs were not properly fixed, and the difference between this kernel and a real 5.10.66 is larger than between 5.10 and 5.10.66. When I first tried to forward-port this kernel to more recent 5.10, I got many conflicts in important bug fixes that couldn’t be resolved because other prior important fixes had simply been dropped as the result of attempts to resolve merge conflicts in the past.

I’m not judging the people who did that, I know for having been in that positoin that it’s extremely difficult to deal with conflicts in the kernel. But it’s also criminal to maintain a fork for that long a time with only merges, because merges hide mistakes forever by claiming that the entirety of the merged kernel is present there while it’s not, it’s only the result of a manual merge that’s in. BSP kernels ought to be rebased on new major branches. For sure that’s more work for chip vendors, but their efforts would be lowered if they invested the same time trying to upstream more stuff, and their lack of care has for consequences that the claimed 5.10.66 doesn’t have all the fixes that the real 5.10.66 has. That’s just a random piece of shit that nobody knows what’s inside.

I think willy explained the situation very well, or could you ask more specifically what you want to know?

scpcom · February 14, 2023, 3:51pm

I can not say anything about the Radxa Kernel yet but I may help to understand what is inside the
Rockchip Kernel (develop-5.10 which is current at 5.10.110).
The 5.10 branch started here (in March 2021):

They did a full reset of all files within one commit. At this point it was a clean Android 5.10.19 (clean files not clean history), only extra files/folders that are not part of mainline or android kernel (like thirdparty GPU and WiFi drivers) stayed in the tree.
From March 2021 to September 2022 they commited 5568 own patches and about 150 other patches which are not just to add the old stuff they also removed obsolete parts (like old wifi/gpu drivers), bug fixing and adding support for new SoCs etc.

If you want to do a closer look at this you can replay the patchset on a clean Andoid Kernel by using this:
https://seafile.servator.de/sbc/odroid/build/patches-rk-develop-5.10-20220930-2.0.zip
The README.txt describes how do do this.
The result will be equal to rockchip-linux branch develop-5.10 without the huge history.

PS: This is more for research not to start a kernel based on the full patchset.

scpcom · February 14, 2023, 7:56am

The radxa kernel is based on rockchip develop-5.10, the difference is shown in the following archives.

stable-5.10-rock5:
109 extra patches/commits (94 radxa, 6 rockchip, 9 others)
https://seafile.servator.de/sbc/radxa/build/patches-radxa-5.10-20221101-1.0.zip

linux-5.10-gen-rkr3.4:
278 extra patches/commits (140 radxa, 121 rockchip, 17 others)
https://seafile.servator.de/sbc/radxa/build/patches-radxa-5.10-20230209-1.0.zip