Linux Kernel in a Nutshell

Managing Your Patches With quilt

Kernel development using patch and diff generally works quite well. But after a while, most people grow tired of it and look for a different way to work that does not involve so much tedious patching and merging. Luckily, a few kernel developers came up with a program called quilt that handles the process of manipulating a number of patches made against an external source tree much easier.

The idea for quilt came from a set of scripts written by Andrew Morton that he used to first maintain the memory management subsystem, and then later the entire development kernel tree. His scripts were tied very tightly to his workflow, but the ideas behind them were very powerful. Andreas Gruenbacher took those ideas and created the quilt tool.

The basic idea behind quilt is that you work with a pristine source tree, and add a bunch of patches on top of it. You can push and pop different patches off of the source tree, and maintain this list of patches in a simple manner.

To get started, create a kernel source tree like always:

$ tar -zxf linux-2.6.19.tar.gz
$ ls
linux-2.6.19/

And go into that directory:

$ cd linux-2.6.19

To get started, create a directory called patches that will hold all of our kernel patches:

$ mkdir patches

Then tell quilt to create a new patch called patch1:

$ quilt new patch1
Patch patches/patch1 is now on top

quilt needs to be told about all of the different files that will be modifed by this new patch. To do this, use the add command: