oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
What happens next is anyones guess. Fun times.

I just spent goodness knows how long staring at code which made no sense at all.
It turned out that one of the patches in the Fedora kernel RPM wasn't being applied
correctly due to fuzz. If I tried to apply it with patch -F1, it would fail.
Without the -F1 it would apply the changes to some area of code completely
unrelated to what I intended.

This was really fun to track down. Unfortunatly, something in rpm-build
doesn't understand %patch's with -F1. Unfun.