drm-intel

drm-intel patch and upstream merge flow and timeline explained

Copyright:

2015 Intel Corporation

Author:

Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@intel.com>

Introduction

This document describes the flow and timeline of drm/i915 patches to various upstream trees.

Rule No. 1

This document is an eternal draft and simply tries to explain the reality of how drm-intel is maintained. If you observe a difference between these rules and reality, it is your assumed responsibility to update the rules.

The Relevant Repositories and Branches

See Repositories and Branches.

Patch and Merge Flow

This chart describes the flow of patches to drm-intel branches, and the merge flow of the commits to drm-upstream and Linus’ tree.

_images/drm-intel-flow.svg

Legend: Green = Linus. Red = drm-upstream. Blue = drm-intel. Black = patches. Yellow = Additional trees from/shared with other subsystems.

Features

Features are picked up and pushed to drm-intel-next by committers and maintainers. See drm-intel Committer Guidelines for details.

Fixes

Fixes are picked up and pushed to drm-intel-next by committers and maintainers, just like any other patches. This is to ensure fixes are pushed in a timely manner. Fixes that are relevant for stable, current development kernels, or drm-next, will be cherry-picked by maintainers to drm-intel-fixes or drm-intel-next-fixes.

To make this work, patches should be labeled as fixes (see XXX), and extra care should be put into making fixes the first patches in series, not depending on preparatory work or cleanup.

Merge Timeline

This chart describes the merge timelines for various branches in terms of one kernel release cycle. Worth noting is that we’re working on two or three kernel releases at the same time. Big features take a long time to hit a kernel release. There are no fast paths.

For predictions on the future merge windows and releases, see http://phb-crystal-ball.org/.