Re: Student Project Ideas

[Ahmed S. Darwish]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 06:32:21PM +0800, Cong WANG wrote:
> 2007/3/29, Russ Meyerriecks <datachomper@xxxxxxxxx>:
> >Hi all,
> >  I've been hacking on the Linux kernel all semester for my OS:
> >Internals class. We are given full autonomy in picking our final
> >programming project and I would love for mine to be /useful/ for the
> >Linux kernel and not just a theoretical exorcise. If anybody has any
> >bug fixes or features maybe they never got around to, and would be
> >suitable for this situation, I would love to hear about them.
> >
> 
> First, I think you can read the book named "Kernel Projects for
> Linux". It's a good book although it's outdated.
> 
> Second, in fact, I am also a college student and also want to find a
> suitable and real task in linux kernel for me to work on. KJ doesn't
> help much. ;-p
> 

No, it really helps alot, just be _patient_. For me, I sent a series of dumb
patches at first to use ARRAY_SIZE macro instead of manual computation. Though
the patches were completely braindead, I learnt alot of stuff about how
everything works here. 

Beside sending this KJ patches, I keep reading from Understanding Linux kernel v3
and reading lots of code everyday. Yesterday my first semi-real patch was
accepted in -mm. I'm sure that day by day my patches will be more real and fix
serious issues. 

All of that wouldn't have smoothly happened without the first step, the KJ step ;).

It seems that being a developer in the kernel community is going exactly like how
code goes, _evolution_ not a revolution. You can't be responsible for a good
project directly, just take your way from a janitor to a subsystem maintaner :).
Ofcourse, unless you have an old experience in other OSs (espcifically Unix ones).

Regards,

-- 
Ahmed S. Darwish
http://darwish.07.googlepages.com

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