How to contribute to latest -rc kernel?

[Bjørn Mork]

Arvid Brodin <arvid.brodin at alten.se> writes:

> I thought the subsystem -next trees was for the next release of Linux? I.e., what
> goes into the net-next tree now will find its way into mainline at the next
> release window, for linux-3.14-rc1?

That's correct.

If your series is for the networking subsystem *and* appropriate for an
-rcX where X > 1, then it should be based on

  https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/davem/net.git/

and you should indicate that you want it applied to "net" instead of
"net-next".  I usually do that by including "net" in the subject prefix,
like e. g.

 Subject: [PATCH net] foo: fix obvious bug

but there are no strict rules about how to do this AFAIK.

Note that the whole series must be applicable to "net".  Don't be
tempted to mix any features in there.  Split those out in a separate
series instead and submit for "net-next".  If they depend on any of the
changes you made to "net", then explain that dependency in the
cover-letter.

And yes, a cover-letter ("PATCH 0/X") is always a good idea when posting
more than 1 patch in a series. Davem use them as pseudo-merge commits,
so whatever you write there is even recorded in the history.  This is a
good place to explain why the series should be applied to "net" if that
isn't 103% obvious (sometimes you need to know a driver pretty well to
understand why something is a bugfix and not a feature).

I believe all this is explained in more detail in the
Documentation/networking/netdev-FAQ.txt document Fan Du pointed you to.
That's a good place to start.  There are some small differences between
networking and most other subsystems, like comment style and stable
submissions.  There's usually no problem if you miss those details in
the beginning - you'll just have to fix it later.  But reading the FAQ
will give you a head start.


Bjørn