IIRC, the patches directory contains patches that aren't directly part
of the Xen modifications (e.g. stuff that is going into upstream Linux
independent of the Xen patches, or stuff that's been backported from a
later kernel release).
The sparse tree is intended for Xen stuff that the developers want to be
able to view and edit in a convenient way (don't have to regenerate and
reapply patches before rebuilding each time something is changed in the
code - instead, the sparse tree files are symlinked into the Linux
source directory, so changes show up immediately).
HTH,
Cheers,
Mark
On Sat, 2007-04-07 at 14:45 +0800, Zongyun Lai wrote:
> Hi all,
> I am new to Xen. I have gone through the source code directory of
> xen-unstable, and have kept a log of all the compiling procedure. I noticed
> that 'make dist-kernels' command will apply patches
> from 'patches/linux-2.6.18/' to the vanilla kernel. And after that, the
> command will apply the the so-call 'arch-xen patches'
> in 'linux-2.6-xen-sparse' directory to the patched kernel by
> running ./mkbuildtree command. I found that this procedure is actually
> not 'patching', but just overwrite some .c, .h, Kconfig and Makefile in
> the 'linux-2.6.18-xen' by symbolic links to the 'linux-2.6-xen-sparse'
> directory.
> So, my question is what is the differences between the two patch
> mechanisms, one in the 'patches' directory, and the other in
> the 'linux-2.6-xen-sparse' directory? That is to say, what is the reason to
> keep them separate instead of keeping them in a common patch pool?
>
> Cheers,
> Zongyun
>
>
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