Introduction...
Greetings all,
Domen Puncer knows me as "GuestMe" on the IRC channel.
I would like to introduce myself as someone who wishes to join the kernel-janitors team in order to help out. My hardware is pretty much
run-of-the-mill: P4P-800VM motherboard, Pentium IV 2.4GHz, dual-boot with Windows, Fedora Core 3 fully updated as of yesterday, including kernel, 2 IDE drives and one SATA drive, one of the IDE drives being my Linux disk, two DVD drives, one of which writes single-layer DVD, 1394 video capture card and an Adaptec SCSI card for a negative scanner.
Domen has told me that there are only 5 of you?
I understand that the TODO list on the website is out of date and needs updating... What are some of the outstanding and high-priority tasks to do that no one has started doing?
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Quoted 8 lines · Stephen Biggs
Greetings all,
Domen Puncer knows me as "GuestMe" on the IRC channel.
I would like to introduce myself as someone who wishes to join the kernel-janitors team in order to help out. My hardware is pretty much run-of-the-mill: P4P-800VM motherboard, Pentium IV 2.4GHz, dual-boot with Windows, Fedora Core 3 fully updated as of yesterday, including kernel, 2 IDE drives and one SATA drive, one of the IDE drives being my Linux disk, two DVD drives, one of which writes single-layer DVD, 1394 video capture card and an Adaptec SCSI card for a negative scanner.
Domen has told me that there are only 5 of you?
Dunno. As regular contributors, maybe. More people pop in every once in awhile (like myself).
Quoted 2 lines
I understand that the TODO list on the website is out of date and needs updating... What are some of the outstanding and high-priority tasks to do that no one has started doing?
Fixing compile warnings. Especially on unmaintained drivers. A make allyesconfig && make bzImage 2>warnings.txt is a great way to start. There's running compiles with the gcc 4 beta, and fixing the new compile warnings that generates. There's also learning how to use sparse, and tackling what it turns up (I'm not to that level, tho...). People are working on them IIRC, but there's a lot of work to be done.
Work off of -mm, since most of the janitorial work will go through Andrew Morton's series for awhile before being pushed into mainline. I've had a few times when I've duplicated work in the -mm tree, only finding out *after* I sent the patches...
There's always whitespace cleanup. Unglamorous but helpful. Not everyone doing cleanup works through this mailing list (Adrian Bunk is the most prolific on LKML) but it is a good place to start kernel work.
Welcome.
Jim
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Quoted 13 lines · Jim Nelson
Quoted 12 lines · Stephen Biggs
Greetings all,
Domen Puncer knows me as "GuestMe" on the IRC channel.
I would like to introduce myself as someone who wishes to join the kernel-janitors team in order to help out. My hardware is pretty much
run-of-the-mill: P4P-800VM motherboard, Pentium IV 2.4GHz, dual-boot with Windows, Fedora Core 3 fully updated as of yesterday, including kernel, 2 IDE drives and one SATA drive, one of the IDE drives being my Linux disk, two DVD drives, one of which writes single-layer DVD, 1394 video capture card and an Adaptec SCSI card for a negative scanner.
Quoted 5 lines
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Domen has told me that there are only 5 of you?
Dunno. As regular contributors, maybe. More people pop in every once in awhile (like myself).
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the reply.
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I understand that the TODO list on the website is out of date and needs updating... What are some of the outstanding and high-priority tasks to do that no one has started doing?
Fixing compile warnings. Especially on unmaintained drivers. A
make allyesconfig && make bzImage 2>warnings.txtis a great way to start.
I will try it with cygwin, then, once I have a patch, I'll move it over to Linux and make sure it does what I think it should do before I submit.
Quoted 3 lines
There's
running compiles with the gcc 4 beta, and fixing the new compile warnings that generates.
Isn't this already being done by one or more people? I have seen this in the archives and I don't want to duplicate work, even though this sounds interesting. Can someone advise and help me coordinate this task?
Quoted 4 lines
There's also learning how to use sparse, and tackling what it turns up
(I'm not to that level, tho...). People are working on them IIRC, but there's a lot of work to be done.
This is my question... all I see is the TODO list which, IMHO, doesn't show the huge amount of work to do that your above statement seems to imply.
Quoted 4 lines
Work off of -mm, since most of the janitorial work will go through Andrew Morton's series for awhile before being pushed into mainline. I've had a few times when I've duplicated work in the -mm tree, only finding out *after* I sent the patches...
Ok, so how do I do that?
I am assuming that
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/ is where I find the -mm stuff? "akpm" is Andrew Morton?
Ok, so I download the latest patch (which right now is
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.11-
rc3/2.6.11-rc3-mm1/2.6.11-rc3-mm1.gz.
Then I download the latest testing kernel with the release that matches the above patch:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/linux-2.6.11-
rc3.tar.gz, apply the patch and go for it.
Do I have it right?
Quoted 6 lines
There's always whitespace cleanup. Unglamorous but helpful. Not everyone doing cleanup works through this mailing list (Adrian Bunk is the most prolific on LKML) but it is a good place to start kernel work.
Welcome.
Thanks much!
Steve
_______________________________________________
Kernel-janitors mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/kernel-janitors
Quoted 8 lines · Stephen Biggs
Quoted 4 lines
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I understand that the TODO list on the website is out of date and needs updating... What are some of the outstanding and high-priority tasks to do that no one has started doing?
Fixing compile warnings. Especially on unmaintained drivers. A
make allyesconfig && make bzImage 2>warnings.txtis a great way to start.I will try it with cygwin, then, once I have a patch, I'll move it over to Linux and make sure it does what I think it should do before I submit.
Don't limit yourself to x86. There are less people looking at the less-popular architectures. Only problem is getting a working cross-compiler. That's another challenge I'm working my way up to.
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There's running compiles with the gcc 4 beta, and fixing the new compile warnings that generates.
Isn't this already being done by one or more people? I have seen this in the archives and I don't want to duplicate work, even though this sounds interesting. Can someone advise and help me coordinate this task?
IIRC, it comes up with thousands of warnings - typecasts, etc.
Quoted 9 lines
Quoted 5 lines
There's also learning how to use sparse, and tackling what it turns up
(I'm not to that level, tho...). People are working on them IIRC, but there's a lot of work to be done.
This is my question... all I see is the TODO list which, IMHO, doesn't show the huge amount of work to do that your above statement seems to imply.
My experience is that there are not enough people doing it to have to worry overmuch about running into someone else's work. Who knows, your work might be better than what someone else submitted, and might be accepted in its place.
Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 2 lines
Work off of -mm, since most of the janitorial work will go through Andrew Morton's series for awhile before being pushed into mainline. I've had a few times when I've duplicated work in the -mm tree, only finding out *after* I sent the patches...
Ok, so how do I do that?
I am assuming that http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/ is where I find the -mm stuff? "akpm" is Andrew Morton?
Or the main www.kernel.org page - listed at the bottom of the releases.
akpm is Andrew Morton - the 2.6 maintainer. -mm is always more experimental, and most patches that might break things end up there for awhile (new arches, new filesystems, driver API changes, etc).
Quoted 8 lines
Ok, so I download the latest patch (which right now is http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.11-
rc3/2.6.11-rc3-mm1/2.6.11-rc3-mm1.gz.Then I download the latest testing kernel with the release that matches the above patch: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/linux-2.6.11-
rc3.tar.gz, apply the patch and go for it.Do I have it right?
Saves some bandwidth to do it this way:
$ tar xjf linux-2.6.10.tar.bz2 $ bzip2 -d patch-2.6.11-rc3.bz2 $ bzip2 -d 2.6.11-rc3-mm1.bz2 $ mv linux-2.6.10 linux-2.6.11-rc3-mm1 $ cd linux-2.6.11-rc3-mm1 $ patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.11-rc3 $ patch -p1 < ../2.6.11-rc3-mm1 $ make mrproper
That means you only have to download the full versions of each stable release, and just get the -rcX and -mmX patches when they are released. I rebuild the tree every -mm release - helps keep cruft and weirdness from popping up when you're doing test compiles.
Quoted 10 lines
Quoted 4 lines
There's always whitespace cleanup. Unglamorous but helpful. Not everyone doing cleanup works through this mailing list (Adrian Bunk is the most prolific on LKML) but it is a good place to start kernel work.
Welcome.
Thanks much!
Steve
Jim
_______________________________________________
Kernel-janitors mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/kernel-janitors
Quoted 10 lines · Jim Nelson
Quoted 9 lines · Stephen Biggs
Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 4 lines
I understand that the TODO list on the website is out of date and needs updating... What are some of the outstanding and high-priority tasks to do that no one has started doing?
Fixing compile warnings. Especially on unmaintained drivers. A
make allyesconfig && make bzImage 2>warnings.txtis a great way to start.
Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 3 lines
I will try it with cygwin, then, once I have a patch, I'll move it over to Linux and make sure it does what I think it should do before I submit.
Don't limit yourself to x86. There are less people looking at the less-popular architectures. Only problem is getting a working cross-compiler. That's another challenge I'm working my way up to.
Yes, I just discovered that cygwin is not up to the task at all. Straight Linux all the way.
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There's
running compiles with the gcc 4 beta, and fixing the new compile warnings that generates.
Quoted 6 lines
Quoted 4 lines
Isn't this already being done by one or more people? I have seen this in the archives and I don't want to duplicate work, even though this sounds interesting. Can someone advise and help me coordinate this task?
IIRC, it comes up with thousands of warnings - typecasts, etc.
Ok, but if I happen to jump into the same area that someone else is doing, this is a duplication of work and a pity, wasted effort. This project needs some real management, and no, I am not a project manager; I know my limitations ;-)
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Quoted 7 lines
There's also learning how to use sparse, and tackling what it turns up
(I'm not to that level, tho...). People are working on them IIRC, but there's a lot of work to be done.
Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 4 lines
This is my question... all I see is the TODO list which, IMHO, doesn't show the huge amount of work to do that your above statement seems to imply.
My experience is that there are not enough people doing it to have to worry overmuch about running into someone else's work. Who knows, your work might be better than what someone else submitted, and might be accepted in its place.
Ah, perhaps, but the flip side to that is that it doesn't matter if either my work or someone else's work is accepted; this is duplicated work and effort and, again, a pity.
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Work off of -mm, since most of the janitorial work will go through Andrew Morton's series for awhile before being pushed into mainline. I've had a few times when I've duplicated work in the -mm tree, only finding out *after* I sent the patches...
Quoted 6 lines
Ok, so how do I do that?
I am assuming that
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/ is where I find the -mm stuff? "akpm" is Andrew Morton?Or the main www.kernel.org page - listed at the bottom of the releases.
akpm is Andrew Morton - the 2.6 maintainer. -mm is always more experimental, and most patches that might break things end up there for awhile (new arches, new filesystems, driver API changes, etc).
Quoted 11 lines
Ok, so I download the latest patch (which right now is
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.11-
rc3/2.6.11-rc3-mm1/2.6.11-rc3-mm1.gz.Then I download the latest testing kernel with the release that matches the above patch:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/linux-2.6.11-
rc3.tar.gz, apply the patch and go for it.Do I have it right?
Saves some bandwidth to do it this way:
$ tar xjf linux-2.6.10.tar.bz2 $ bzip2 -d patch-2.6.11-rc3.bz2 $ bzip2 -d 2.6.11-rc3-mm1.bz2 $ mv linux-2.6.10 linux-2.6.11-rc3-mm1 $ cd linux-2.6.11-rc3-mm1 $ patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.11-rc3 $ patch -p1 < ../2.6.11-rc3-mm1 $ make mrproper
Quoted 4 lines
That means you only have to download the full versions of each stable release, and just get the -rcX and -mmX patches when they are released. I rebuild the tree every -mm release - helps keep cruft and weirdness from popping up when you're doing test compiles.
Yes, this is a better way. But, since I started out the other way, I'll continue with my way for this release and go to your way next time.
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Quoted 7 lines
There's always whitespace cleanup. Unglamorous but helpful. Not everyone doing cleanup works through this mailing list (Adrian Bunk is the most prolific on LKML) but it is a good place to start kernel work.
Welcome.
Quoted 7 lines
Quoted 4 lines
Thanks much!
Steve
Jim
Steve
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Kernel-janitors mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/kernel-janitors
Quoted 13 lines · Jim Nelson
Quoted 11 lines · Stephen Biggs
Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 4 lines
I understand that the TODO list on the website is out of date and needs updating... What are some of the outstanding and high-priority tasks to do that no one has started doing?
Fixing compile warnings. Especially on unmaintained drivers. A
make allyesconfig && make bzImage 2>warnings.txtis a great way to start.
Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 3 lines
I will try it with cygwin, then, once I have a patch, I'll move it over to Linux and make sure it does what I think it should do before I submit.
Don't limit yourself to x86. There are less people looking at the less-popular architectures. Only problem is getting a working cross-compiler. That's another challenge I'm working my way up to.
In the absence of local cross-compiling, you could also submit your patch to the PLM tool at http://www.osdl.org/plm-cgi/plm/
and it will cross-compile the patch on 8 arches. Latest -mm as example:
https://www.osdl.org/plm-cgi/plm?module=patch_info&patch_idA51
Quoted 4 lines
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There's running compiles with the gcc 4 beta, and fixing the new compile warnings that generates.
Quoted 9 lines
Quoted 4 lines
Isn't this already being done by one or more people? I have seen this in the archives and I don't want to duplicate work, even though this sounds interesting. Can someone advise and help me coordinate this task?
IIRC, it comes up with thousands of warnings - typecasts, etc.
Quoted 2 lines
Quoted 2 lines
There's also learning how to use sparse, and tackling what it turns up
http://www.xenotime.net/linux/doc/sparse_howto.txt
and I need to update it to tell how to use more sparse options, something like:
To use other sparse options, run make like:
make C=1 CHECK="sparse -Wbitwise" all >check.out 2>&1
Quoted 58 lines
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Quoted 2 lines
(I'm not to that level, tho...). People are working on them IIRC, but there's a lot of work to be done.
This is my question... all I see is the TODO list which, IMHO, doesn't show the huge amount of work to do that your above statement seems to imply.
My experience is that there are not enough people doing it to have to worry overmuch about running into someone else's work. Who knows, your work might be better than what someone else submitted, and might be accepted in its place.
Quoted 8 lines
Quoted 5 lines
Work off of -mm, since most of the janitorial work will go through Andrew Morton's series for awhile before being pushed into mainline. I've had a few times when I've duplicated work in the -mm tree, only finding out *after* I sent the patches...
Quoted 6 lines
Ok, so how do I do that?
I am assuming that
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/ is where I find the -mm stuff? "akpm" is Andrew Morton?Or the main www.kernel.org page - listed at the bottom of the releases.
akpm is Andrew Morton - the 2.6 maintainer. -mm is always more experimental, and most patches that might break things end up there for awhile (new arches, new filesystems, driver API changes, etc).
Quoted 11 lines
Ok, so I download the latest patch (which right now is
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.11-
rc3/2.6.11-rc3-mm1/2.6.11-rc3-mm1.gz.Then I download the latest testing kernel with the release that matches the above patch:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/linux-2.6.11-
rc3.tar.gz, apply the patch and go for it.Do I have it right?
Saves some bandwidth to do it this way:
$ tar xjf linux-2.6.10.tar.bz2 $ bzip2 -d patch-2.6.11-rc3.bz2 $ bzip2 -d 2.6.11-rc3-mm1.bz2 $ mv linux-2.6.10 linux-2.6.11-rc3-mm1 $ cd linux-2.6.11-rc3-mm1 $ patch -p1 < ../patch-2.6.11-rc3 $ patch -p1 < ../2.6.11-rc3-mm1 $ make mrproper
Quoted 4 lines
That means you only have to download the full versions of each stable release, and just get the -rcX and -mmX patches when they are released. I rebuild the tree every -mm release - helps keep cruft and weirdness from popping up when you're doing test compiles.
There are scripts that will download and apply patches for you. E.g., ketchup from http://www.selenic.com/ketchup/
or grab-kernel-rc from http://developer.osdl.org/rddunlap/scripts/
Quoted 4 lines
Quoted 4 lines
Quoted 4 lines
There's always whitespace cleanup. Unglamorous but helpful. Not everyone doing cleanup works through this mailing list (Adrian Bunk is the most prolific on LKML) but it is a good place to start kernel work.
Most of Adrian's recent work is the result of using "make namespacecheck". See "make help" in kernel top-level dir. for all possible make options.
If anyone is interested in stack reduction patches (besides me), I'm willing to help people understand what needs to be done, how to do it, etc., i.e., basically tutor people on this on this mailing list. (See "make checkstack".) Same applies to misused code section references (see "make buildcheck").
Signature · 5 lines
~Randy _______________________________________________ Kernel-janitors mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/kernel-janitors
Quoted 7 lines · Randy.Dunlap
In the absence of local cross-compiling, you could also submit your patch to the PLM tool at http://www.osdl.org/plm-cgi/plm/
and it will cross-compile the patch on 8 arches. Latest -mm as example:
https://www.osdl.org/plm-cgi/plm?module=patch_info&patch_id=4151
Thanks for the pointer. One of those things that is very useful to have available.
Quoted 6 lines
If anyone is interested in stack reduction patches (besides me), I'm willing to help people understand what needs to be done, how to do it, etc., i.e., basically tutor people on this on this mailing list. (See "make checkstack".) Same applies to misused code section references (see "make buildcheck").
Although I don't have infinite time to dedicate to it, I'm up for it. I'm not very experienced, but am willing to flog my brain until I understand it.
After all, I came in here with the intent of learning kernel coding - gotta get beyond search-and-replace eventually ;)
Jim
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Jim Nelson <[email protected]> :
[...]
Quoted 3 lines
Don't limit yourself to x86. There are less people looking at the less-popular architectures. Only problem is getting a working cross-compiler. That's another challenge I'm working my way up to.
If you don't mind dumb scripts: http://www.fr.zoreil.com/people/francois/cross
{i386/sparc64}-make.sh are not related to the compiler itself but they help me building kernels.
--
Ueimor
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