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...
View ArticleFlock 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...
View ArticleLinux 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...
View ArticleBisection, 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...
View ArticleDebugging 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...
View ArticleBisection, 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleLinaro 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...
View ArticleIon 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleA 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...
View ArticleGit, 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...
View ArticleIt'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...
View ArticleGrabbing 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...
View ArticleBuilding 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...
View ArticleI 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...
View ArticleKernel 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...
View ArticleDo 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...
View ArticleUpstreaming 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....
View ArticleThe 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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