Alan Cox patches

[lazyboy]

Dear LNO people,
I have always been wondering why are there patches for the kernel written by Alan Cox?
What are the patches' uses? Does a linuxnewbie find any use for it?

[drmbb]

Generally speaking, patches allow you to fix security problems or other bugs with an existing kernel, without having to download and compile the entire new version of the kernel (the patches being much smaller than a full kernel and headers download).

And yes, if they are applicable to your current kernel version, they can be very useful to anyone running Linux.

[sans-hubris]

Alan Cox is just another very well reputated kernel programmer, second only to Linus Torvalds himself, so yes, his patches are very useful. Recently though, when I look at the changelogs at kernel.org, it looks like he's been responsible with merging kernel sources with the main kernel source. Him and Linus work together a lot.