Sync XIA-for-linux with mainline repo

[elshyam]

[cjdoucette]

It's been a couple of years since we rebased our code over the new kernel, so it's not a bad idea to do so. However, we're currently focused on other projects so we might not be able to review it right away. We also prefer to rebase the commits that deal with XIA on top of the new kernel. In other words, you should take the commits from here:

https://github.com/AltraMayor/XIA-for-Linux/commits/xia

And rebase them on top of the new kernel so that the branch you are trying to merge has all of the XIA commits at the top.

Aside from that, you'll need to adapt the XIA code to meet any API changes from the kernel during the past couple of years. Git probably won't catch these conflicts -- they can only be caught by compiling and testing XIA.

It can be a fairly complicated process and is probably not the easiest task. If you are looking to get involved with our group, I would recommend trying the Gatekeeper issues that are marked as good first issues:

https://github.com/AltraMayor/gatekeeper/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22

[AltraMayor]

Complementing Cody's answer with steps:

1. Clone XIA repository;
2. Update the master with Linus' tree;
3. Rebase the XIA code to the newest kernel patching conflicts. Document these conflicts and solutions;
4. Write patches that fix changes in the kernel. A example of this is commit 83a8f34f9a3097a837a77f0fef6699d887fabba9;
5. Test the newly rebased XIA kernel with at least one of the experiments on the wiki (e.g. https://github.com/AltraMayor/XIA-for-Linux/wiki/4ID-principals).

After that, I'll rebase the kernel with you documented solutions for the conflicts, and you'll be able to issue a pull request with only the patches of step 4.