help in the MM Area of the Linux Kernel

Yubin Ruan ablacktshirt at gmail.com
Mon Oct 9 21:50:21 EDT 2017


2017-10-07 0:34 GMT+08:00  <valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu>:
> On Thu, 05 Oct 2017 18:14:08 +0200, Damian Tometzki said:
>
>> i'am intrested in helping and Bug Fixing in the mm area of the linux
>> kernel.
>>
>> For driver development is it clear check in the staging area the
>> TODO's.
>>
>> And what is the process for other areas of the kernel for example mm
>> (Memory management X86) ?
>
> Rule 1 of kernel hacking:  Not every mechanic gets to work on Formula 1
> engines.
>
> For mm, you'll probably need to show some expertise in other kernel areas,
> *plus* have a deep understanding of memory management theory. That code has
> already been worked over by multiple professionals, which means pretty much all
> the easy stuff has already been done.
>
> Oh, and you're probably going to also need knowledge of the kernel
> instrumentation - perf, tracepoints, and friends.
>
> If you manage to find an actual bug in that code, it is most likely going to be
> some weird corner case, and *much* MM clue will be required to fix it without
> breaking some *other* more common corner case.  Remember that the same code has
> to Do The Right Thing on everything from an embedded system with 32M of RAM and
> only one major process running, to large mainframe class boxes with a terabyte
> of RAM, a large Oracle instance, and several hundred Apache / Tomcat / etc

um...terabyte of RAM? Can you name one of those machine with so much RAM?

Yubin



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