Shallow Linux Kernel git trees

Why

• Full, non-shallow clones of Linux kernel trees are multiple gigabytes in size, and take a lot of time to process.
• Shallow clones are much smaller, but cloning/fetching shallow trees impose a huge load on the git server (eg: kernel.org)
• kernel.org has git bundles available for download over HTTPS/CDN (simple file download).
  • in fact, they recommend their use and have instructions
• So this repo does the heavy lifting, grabbing bundles, updating them from live git servers, and makes them shallow and ready for consumption.
  • Produced shallow bundles are around 250mb as of 5.18.
  • Produced shallow bundles include all tags for the version involved, including -rc tags
  • Scheduled runs update the bundles every 24hs, using GitHub actions, including caching.

How to use

• Example for 5.17:

# Download the bundle from this repo's Github releases.
wget --continue --progress=dot:giga -O "linux-5.17.gitbundle" "https://github.com/rpardini/armbian-git-shallow/releases/download/latest/linux-5.17.gitbundle"
git init linux-5.17 # init an empty repo
cd linux-5.17 # go into it
git remote add "linux-5.17-bundle" "../linux-5.17.gitbundle" # add the downloaded bundle as a remote
wget -O ".git/shallow" "https://github.com/rpardini/armbian-git-shallow/releases/download/latest/linux-5.17.gitshallow" # download .git/shallow
git fetch linux-5.17-bundle # fetch from the bundle.
git checkout FETCH_HEAD # checkout from the bundle's HEAD
git tag -l # look at the available tags (all 5.17-related tags)