Just as a follow-up: I was just told that the _patches thing is something that gets done to our internal tree, so forget about that inconsistency. What remains is the question why some of what's in these patches is already in the sparse tree. Is that simply because the patches get applied before overlaying the sparse tree, and hence the files that are in the sparse tree have to duplicate the code? If so, it would seem much cleaner to remove i386-mach-io-check-nmi.patch and smp-alts.patch (as they appear to completely live in the sparse tree) and add the few files needed for fully applying the others.