Linux: -mm Hotfixes

Chuck Ebbert raised an issue with the stability of Andrew Morton [interview]'s 2.6 -mm kernel development tree, "most -mm kernels have small but critical bugs that are found shortly after release. Patches for these are posted on linux-kernel but they aren't made available on kernel.org until the next -mm release." Andrew releases a complete copy of his -mm kernel with varying frequency, not making the in between tree-states available from source control due to his development methods [story].

As a solution, Check suggested the creation of a hotfix directory for each -mm release, in which critical fixes could be placed as they are discovered, "I'm talking about patches for problems that keep you from even testing
-mm, or that fix really annoying things you hit while testing.". Andrew agreed to the idea, "OK, I'll create a hot-fixes directory there and will try to remember to put stuff into it." The release of the 2.6.16-rc1-mm5 kernel quickly followed and includeda directory for critical hot-fixes.