how to begin contributing to the linux kernel
Dileep Sankhla
dileepsankhla.ds at gmail.com
Tue May 13 07:48:19 EDT 2025
Hello everyone,
1. My background
I am a professional software engineer with 1.5 years of experience.
For 6-7 months, I worked on creating my own Unix-like kernel from
scratch for my x86-64 laptop. I wrote the device drivers for NVMe over
PCIe, a local APIC timer and interrupt controller (x2APIC mode), a
PS/2 keyboard, the real-time clock, and terminal output. I developed
my own UEFI bootloader and worked on an interrupt handling mechanism.
I implemented a physical memory manager using the free stack data
structure and an ext2 file system driver. I briefly worked on my own
flat file system as an experiment. I also experimented with my own
64-bit paging for a while. That's it.
I know a good amount of C (I think my skill in C is between
beginner-intermediate level) and I have a year of experience using it.
I also did Google Summer of Code with KDE in 2018. There I used C++.
2. My question
How can I begin contributing to the linux kernel? I already have one
contribution but that is about fixing a checkpatch.pl warning (see
[0]). Now I think I want to begin fixing a beginner bug in a subsystem
like "filesystem". I am interested in filesystems. I searched a lot
about this over the internet but I can't figure out what I need to do
and need to learn to begin contributing again. Thanks.
Regards,
Dileep
[0]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=b79f3f68cc306637b88072804396685dc037c779
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