[plug] patching rh7 kernel to 2.2.18

[Matt Kemner]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2001, Jon  Miller wrote:

> I believe it to be one from RedHat (actually this came off the APC CD). 
> Just curious, why is it on a RedHat system (v7.0) that the one from
> RedHat doesn't work.  I can understand if it was another flavor of
> Linux, but this is Redhat 7.0 that was loaded. 

Jon, a kernel patch is where someone has taken 2 kernel sources and run
"diff" to find out the differences.  Usually they will use the latest
kernel source, as made available by Linus, and compare it with their own
kernel tree, which will have whatever changes they made.

Patch uses this diff file to allow the rest of us to take the original
kernel tree, and apply the patch and end up with the kernel tree the patch
developer had - in this case, including the latest IDE drivers.

If you try to apply the patch to a kernel tree that does not match the
tree the patch developer used as a base, and the patch modifies files that
are different from what it expects, patch is unable to work out what
sections need to be patched, and reports the errors you saw.

If you know a little bit of programming, and you find that out of a large
patch only a very small section failed, it is often possible to work out
what changes need to be made, and make them manually.. However in your
case practicaly the entire patch failed, so I doubt that would be easy.

It is possible the RedHat kernel already has the ide patch in it.
I would not know the best place to find out though. Presumably somewhere
on their website.

Otherwise, download the official kernel tree and patch that. That is
guaranteed to work, providing you get the exact kernel version the patch
developer specifies - in this case because the patch has "2.2.18" in the
name it should be safe to assume it is a patch for kernel 2.2.18, but it
often pays to check the site you got the patch from for any special
instructions.

 - Matt