Re: [KJ] Introduction...

[Jim Nelson <james4765@cwazy.co.uk>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3685 bytes --]

Stephen Biggs wrote:
>>>I understand that the TODO list on the website is out of date and needs 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.
> 
> 
> 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.

> 
>> 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.

> 
>> 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.

> 
>>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).

> 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.

> 
>>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

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/plain, Size: 167 bytes --]

_______________________________________________
Kernel-janitors mailing list
Kernel-janitors@lists.osdl.org
http://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/kernel-janitors