Linux Kernel in a Nutshell

Applying the patch

As the patches we have downloaded are compressed, the first thing to do is uncompress them with the bzip2 command:

$ bzip2 -dv patch-2.6.17.9-10.bz2
  patch-2.6.17.9-10.bz2: done
$ bzip2 -dv patch-2.6.17.10-11.bz2
  patch-2.6.17.10-11.bz2: done
$ ls -F
good_config linux-2.6.17.9/  patch-2.6.17.10-11  patch-2.6.17.9-10

Now we need to apply the patch files to the kernel directory. Go into the directory:

$ cd linux-2.6.17.9

and run the patch program to apply the first patch moving the source tree from the 2.6.17.9 to the 2.6.17.10 release:

$ patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.17.9-10
patching file Makefile
patching file block/elevator.c
patching file fs/udf/super.c
patching file fs/udf/truncate.c
patching file include/net/sctp/sctp.h
patching file include/net/sctp/sm.h
patching file net/sctp/sm_make_chunk.c
patching file net/sctp/sm_statefuns.c
patching file net/sctp/socket.c

Verify that the patch really did work properly and that there are no errors or warnings in the output of the patch program. It is also a good idea to look at the Makefile of the kernel to see the kernel version:

$ $ head -n 5 Makefile
VERSION = 2
PATCHLEVEL = 6
SUBLEVEL = 17
EXTRAVERSION = .10
NAME=Crazed Snow-Weasel

Now that the kernel is at the 2.6.17.10 release level, do the same thing as before and apply the patch to bring it up to the 2.6.17.11 level:

$ patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.17.10-11 patching file Makefile patching file arch/ia64/kernel/sys_ia64.c patching file arch/sparc/kernel/sys_sparc.c patching file ...