I'm very sorry for taking so long to reply to your message. The 2.6-current/ patches are usually meant to apply to the daily Linus current GIT tree, though at the moment they are actually still based on 2.6.23. Those patches cannot be expected to apply to older kernel versions.
The README.backport files describes the backport patch sets I'm maintaining. Though the backport updates are often only in occasional batches, I will be keeping the 2.6.18 backport up to date for the foreseeable future. I have no plans to work on any backports to kernels older than 2.6.18, though anyone else is of course welcome to do so. I would imagine that 2.6.16 is not too different from 2.6.18. So I would recommend that you start with the 2.6.18/ backport patches and work from there. I suggest using the "quilt" tool to apply one patch at a time (that's how I maintain the backport patches myself). If one has rejects, it is probably straightforward to eyeball the 2.6.16<->2.6.18 difference that made the hunk not apply, and fix it up by hand even if you are not intimately familiar with the code being patched. Then you can use quilt refresh to update that patch file before you do quilt push to look at the next patch. In my experience doing the other backports, there were conflicts requiring hand-editting in only a few of the several patches, and it was pretty easy to handle them one at a time. Thanks, Roland
