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Please sign off your patches

One aspect of open source that appeals to many people is the idea that anyone can contribute. All it takes is a great idea, a little bit of work, and you can have fame, glory, and more conference...

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Flock 2015 and being new in town

I spent most of last week at Flock 2015 in Rochester, NY. I had a blast and I tip my hat (fedora?) to everyone involved in making the conference run smoothly. I didn't go to a huge number of sessions...

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Linux Plumbers Conference 2015

Linux Plumbers 2015 finished up last Friday. Another great conference. The focus of Plumbers is supposed to be more problem solving/discussion and less talking/lecturing. To really get the most out of...

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Bisection, part 1

(This was originally going to be a post on the pains of scripting bisection but the background on the importance of bisection turned out to be long enough) One of the most frustrating parts of Fedora...

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Debugging modprobe in dracut

Related to bisection, I've been working on some custom packaging of the kernel. This has basically involved hacking away at the existing kernel.spec file until I get something that's usable and does...

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Bisection, part 2

As described before, bisection works by taking a series of commits and testing systematically to find which commit introduced the regression. This doesn't match well with the current development model...

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The Art of Communicating with LKML

For most users of distros, the distro bug system is the first line of interaction when something kernel related breaks on their system. This makes sense: the kernel most users are using is packaged by...

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Linaro Connect US '15

One of the items that came out of Linux plumbers for me was discussion on the future of the Ion memory manager for Android. While not as relevant to my day to day work anymore, I still have a lot of...

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Ion past and future

I've mentioned Ion a few times in past posts now, so this post is explaining some of past, present, and maybe future for Ion from my perspective. Ion arose mostly out of necessity for Android. When...

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The work of maintaining a kernel tree

As mentioned in the previous discussion on bisection, Fedora maintains a series of patches on top of the kernel.org kernel (Kernel jargon: if you here something referred to as "vanilla kernel" it's...

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A look at the kernel bisection scripts

I've been hacking on the bisection scripts for quite some time now. Things got stalled for a bit in October/November. I introduced several bugs which caused me to lose multiple days of testing...

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Git, binary files, and patches

$ mkdir test_repo $ cd test_repo/ $ git init Initialized empty Git repository in /home/labbott/test_repo/.git/ $ touch foo $ git add foo $ git commit -m "this file" [ master (root-commit) c51ba67] this...

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It's okay, break your kernel

For those who haven't worked on it before, the kernel can give off an aura of mystery. It's a black box that gives error codes back when you don't make system calls right. This has the unfortunate...

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Grabbing kernel patches from mailing lists and the internet

The kernel community runs on mailing lists. All change sets end up through one mailing list or another. The mailing list is great for reviewing and reading changes but eventually the patches need to be...

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Building and adding patches to the Fedora kernel

Inevitably, after finding an interesting patch file it's time to actually add it to the Fedora kernel. The kernel team has tried our best to keep the wiki instructions up to date. The build...

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I hate benchmarking

Among development tasks, one of my least favorite is benchmarking and I tend to procrastinate on it (by writing blog posts, for example). Allow me to enumerate some reasons why I hate doing...

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Kernel self protection introduction

At the last kernel summit, Kees Cook started calling for people to participate in the "Kernel Self Protection Project" to increase security or 'harden' the kernel. The goal is to focus on eliminating...

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Do Outreachy with the Fedora kernel team!

Compared to my other kernel teammates, I'm a relative newcomer to how the kernel is packaged and prepared. They've been amazing at helping me understand how the Fedora kernel comes together. Much of...

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Upstreaming in steps

I previously discussed the kernel self protection project. As part of this, I've been looking at free memory sanitization. This task is a great example about how features actually get into the kernel....

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The kernel blame game

Fedora is a system of many individual pieces, each of which can affect the others. The kernel is usually fairly self-contained, or at least it tries to be. This is a story of two issues triggered by...

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