Comment 118 for bug 296610

I don't know if it's been mentioned yet, and I hope that I'm not misunderstanding you, but there's no reason to recompile the whole kernel just to apply a patch to a single module. Get the source for your kernel, copy the config file from the boot directory, copy the Modules.symvers from the headers directory, and then "make prepare", "make scripts", and "make oldconfig". Apply the patch, and then make only the module that you want to rebuild. That is, in the case of psmouse, "make modules SUBDIRS=drivers/input/mouse". Then simply copy psmouse.ko into your modules directory, and it should work. I know I'm skipping a lot of steps, but you can use the information here to look up exactly how to do it.