Question about Patch Submissions

I've read the documentation I've been able to find on the patch submission process. I was hoping to clarify one thing though. When submitting a patch that spans multiple files and functions is it better to break the submission down by function or by file?

Thanks for your time,

Chris

It depends on what you change, if your patch is trivial, say just cleaning up whitespaces, or a big single patch doesn't harm review, it is okay not to split it.
Otherwise, probably you need to split it logically, each of which needs to at least compile.

Cong,

Thanks for the response.

It's a pretty extensive patch set and we're trying to make sure it makes sense in context. It touches quite a few files and they're mostly interdependent. That's why we're having problems trying to figure out how to break this down for presentation. We can make sure each section of the patch applies cleanly but the entirety of the patch set would have to be applied for it to compile.

Chris

all patches need to compile cleanly on all architectures, otherwise bisect will be broken.

The issue is that this is large patch set. The diff comes in at around 2200 lines and adds new functionality to the kernel by implementing RFC 4898. What I'm really trying to figure out is how to split up the diff files so I'm not dropping all 2200 lines into a single email message. I'm assuming that's not really how people want to see submissions but if I am incorrect please let me know.

There are two major components that we should be able to submit as distinct patches so that should reduce the line count per submission.

Chris Rapier