Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751112AbaAEJca (ORCPT ); Sun, 5 Jan 2014 04:32:30 -0500 Received: from mail-pb0-f51.google.com ([209.85.160.51]:53273 "EHLO mail-pb0-f51.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750915AbaAEJc2 convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Sun, 5 Jan 2014 04:32:28 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20140104213654.0f0b34f2@neptune.home> References: <20140104213654.0f0b34f2@neptune.home> Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2014 10:32:27 +0100 X-Google-Sender-Auth: O6_1zFzINRXGqVADPnzH294RXHg Message-ID: Subject: Re: How does a newbie find work? From: Geert Uytterhoeven To: "Gideon D'souza" Cc: =?UTF-8?Q?Bruno_Pr=C3=A9mont?= , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 9:36 PM, Bruno Prémont wrote: >> Is there some simple work a newbie like me can take up? Any maintainer >> need some grunt work done? Or perhaps someone could suggest a pet >> project I could try to understand things better? (Should I be learning >> how to write device drivers?) >> >> Things that are very interesting to me so far are the KVM and the Scheduler. > > Starting with writing some driver (or improving existing drivers) is one > option, though that wont get you doing work in relation with the scheduler > (maybe there is some minor driver-like work for KVM though, don't know). > > A better start, and at least as useful is to read and review patches > flowing by that affect your areas of interest, test them and provide > feedback about possible bugs or improvements (proposing patches to fix > those if applicable or even just providing performance data [what > workloads benefit or suffer from given feature-patches and by how much] > for things like scheduler changes). > > This way you will get to know the development process, maintainers > and the internals of the kernel in those areas - don't forget to subscribe > to the specific mailing lists! Yep, all very good advices. And while following the above, you will hopefully notice things that need bug fixes, cleanups, or other work. E.g. one thing I just noticed: while include/linux/compiler-gcc.h provides shorthands (e.g. "__printf()") for various gcc __attribute__ macros, there are still many places that don't use the shorthands, cfr. e.g. "git grep 'attribute.*printf'". As some of these are in architecture-specific header files, and need build testing there, this is an opportunity to get some cross-compilers going (you can download binaries from https://www.kernel.org/pub/tools/crosstool/) as well. Good luck, thanks, and welcome to the team! ;-) Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/