Re: Soft scrolling on framebuffer consoles - with GPM Handling - revised for kernel 6.18.28 (etc.)

Hi Alan,

> Le 13 mai 2026 à 07:47, Alan Mackenzie <[email protected]> a écrit :
> 
> Hello, Ben.
> 
> On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 20:24:15 -0400, Ben Knoble wrote:
> 
> 
>>> Le 12 mai 2026 à 18:20, Alan Mackenzie <[email protected]> a écrit :
> 
>>> Hello, Vitaly.
> 
>>>>> On Wed, May 13, 2026 at 00:24:57 +0400, Vitaly Zdanevich wrote:
>>>>>  Thanks.
>> 
>>>> Thank you for trying it out!
>> 
>>>>>  Can it [patch to enable soft scrolling in the gentoo-sources kernel]
>>>>>  be integrated into gentoo-sources? Or with USE flag?
>> 
>>>> This would be difficult. ...
>> 
>> [ .... ]
>> 
>>>> So, while I would like the patch to be incorporated into gentoo-sources,
>>> I can't see it as likely to happen.
> 
>> However, using /etc/portage/patches (or w/e the path is; on mobile) it
>> should be possible to make use of the patch somewhat easy?
> 
> Thanks for the idea!  I've used /etc/portage/patches before for a couple
> of personal enhancements.
> 
> Thanks for the link to the pertinent wiki page, Alexis.  It was useful.
> 
> The patch should pretty much work as it is in /etc/portage/patches.  I
> just need to work out precisely how to say "apply to version 6.18.26
> onwards" in the patch file path.  I was wondering how to specify the
> option -p1 to patch (that's the option which ignores the first component
> of the file paths when searching for source files to amend), but it seems
> this is the default anyway.
> 
> The only problem I see is that when the kernel's console code gets
> further enhanced and the patch no longer applies, it could take me some
> while (possibly two or three days) to update the patch.  This would be
> inconvenient (kernel builds failing) for those with the patch already in
> /etc/portage/patches.

That is indeed a concern; see https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/46238 where I had to rebase a Gentoo-carried patch for Git. I imagine you’d do something similar.

> So I'll take a closer look at this.  Hopefully it will be as simple as
> asking people to do
> 
>    # mv .../6.18.28-GPM-NO-MD.20260511.diff /etc/portage/patches/...
> 
> ..
> 
> --
> Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Best of luck. Glad I could help!