Abdun Nihaal

Contributing to Linux kernel

The Linux kernel, which powers a wide array of devices ranging from small single board computers to supercomputers and cloud systems, is the largest free and open source project in development today. It is being developed at an increasingly rapid pace. The last 6.1 release includes commits from 2043 developers from across the globe, 303 of which were made by first-time contributors.

Have you ever wanted to contribute back to the kernel? Do you want to help make the Linux kernel better? In this talk, I’ll go over the different ways in which we, as beginners, can start contributing to the Linux kernel by testing development kernels, helping with documentation, cleaning up staging drivers, and fixing bugs. I’ll present a brief overview of each, and go a little deeper into finding and fixing bugs with tools like checkpatch.pl, sparse, etc.