Don't know where to start linux kernel programming

[Ruben Safir]

On 08/22/2017 01:39 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 12:59:31PM -0400, valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>> On Tue, 22 Aug 2017 12:48:42 -0400, Cindy-Sue Causey said:
>>
>>> An observation that may just mean I haven't stumbled upon it yet is
>>> that it would be nice to... stumble upon... a list of kernel problems
>>> that *kernelnewbies* could cut their teeth on. I do understand that
>>> this is a naive wish list item due to the nearly every nanosecond
>>> changing complexity of things. :)
>>
>> Such a thing existed 10 or 15 years ago.  Unfortunately for the newbies, there
>> are very few problems that newbies can attack, because if they were that
>> simple, somebody would already have *done* them.
> 
> Not really, please look at drivers/staging/*/TODO there are loads of
> simple things left to do, with more being added all the time (a huge new
> wireless driver just landed that could use lots of cleanups.)
> 
>> One thing in particular that pretty much killed the kernel-janitors project
>> (which did cleanup of code) was a change in the rules for kernel API changes.
>> Before, somebody could add a new/changed API, and the janitors would change all
>> the uses in the tree.  We now require that a patch series that changes an API
>> has to also fix all in-tree uses of the API.
> 
> That's always been the rule, you could never break the build.  What is
> better now in that people who do the new API usually fix everything up
> at the same time because they want to drop the old API sooner rather
> than later.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h
> 

You need the hardware though?