[OSSNA] Intro to kernel hacking tutorial

[Tobin C. Harding]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 12:36:58PM +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 05, 2019 at 12:50:55PM +1000, Tobin C. Harding wrote:
> > Outcome will (hopefully) be a small patch set into drivers/staging/.
> > (Don't worry Greg only one group got to this stage last time, you
> > won't get flooded with patches :)
> 
> We're good at reviewing floods of patches.  Send away.
> 
> In the end what we want is people who will take over a driver and
> understand it completely and become the maintainer.  We've had a few
> people that did appointed themselves to become the maintainer of a
> random driver and move it out of staging.  But even if people don't make
> it all the way to become a maintainer, it's nice when they start down
> that path by focusing on one driver and trying to understand it as much
> as possible.
> 
> Most of the time when you look at a new staging driver, then you do want
> to clean up the white space just because it's hard to look at
> non-standard code.  So that's the first step.  But then maybe start at
> the probe and release functions and clean it up.  Keep your eyes open
> to any other mistakes or bugs you see.  Write them down.  Then the
> ioctls.  Etc.  Look at the TODO too.
> 
> The other thing I wish people knew was about the relationship with
> maintainers.  When you start out, you're virtually anonymous for the
> first couple patchsets.  We get so many and they blend together so we
> don't remember your name.  So don't think that we mean anything
> personally if we don't apply your patch.  We have forgotten about the
> patch as soon as we reply to it.  Don't panic and resend quickly.  You
> will be too stressed.  Wait until the next day.
> 
> In staging we really want to apply patches (unless it's in staging
> because we're going to remove the code).  I get annoyed with other
> staging reviewers who NAK patches because "I don't like churn" or
> whatever.
> 
> On the other hand, patches just "silencing checkpatch.pl" is not a valid
> justification for sending a patch.  Patches should make the code more
> readable.
> 
> Anyway, maintainers are not monsters.  Very few people have made me
> annoyed to the point where I refuse to review their code.  And everyone
> else is in my good books so that's fine.

Cool, points noted.  Thanks Dan


	Tobin