Re: Guidance on contributing to MM subsystem

[Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@gmail.com>]

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On Sun, Nov 09, 2025 at 02:14:50PM +0000, Swaraj Gaikwad wrote:
> Hi Dev,
> Thank you so much for your reply and for sharing your experience.
> I do have some basic understanding of how parts of the MM subsystem work,
> but I’m still struggling with how to find meaningful issues or tasks to work
> on. For example, I’ve been trying to explore various parts of the code and
> read through documentation to get a better grasp of how things fit together.
> 
> In other open-source projects, like on GitHub, there’s usually an “Issues”
> section where contributors can easily find bugs or tasks to work on. In the
> kernel, should I mainly focus on exploring TODOs, adding selftests, or
> improving documentation (especially for new or less-documented parts)? I
> also believe branches like mm-unstable and mm-new might have ongoing issues
> or regressions, but how do developers usually find or detect them? Would
> simply building these branches expose such problems through compiler errors,
> or should I try building with different configurations (for example, using
> defconfig and other configs) to uncover potential issues?
> 
> Even though I’m beginning to understand how different parts of the subsystem
> interact, I’m not sure how developers usually identify new bugs or feature
> ideas to work on. Once I understand the code flow better, how can I
> effectively find such issues or areas where help is actually needed?

I can only speak for the documentation subsystem as I'm regular there.

For docs, I'm usually watching linux-next mailing list and looking for new
build warnings report there. If the report says htmldocs AND the warnings are
emitted from Sphinx (look for [docutils] like [1]), I reproduce them locally
(make sure to set up the environment per Documentation/doc-guide/sphinx.rst)
and fix them (in that case, I submit [2]). In absence of aforementioned, I
build htmldocs then wandered through its resulting output to see what
formatting improvements I can make and submit (e.g. [3], [4], and [5]).

Thanks.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-next/20251106143925.578e411b@canb.auug.org.au/
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-doc/20251107081300.13033-2-bagasdotme@gmail.com/
[3]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-doc/20251103093817.52764-2-bagasdotme@gmail.com/
[4]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-doc/20251017064525.28836-2-bagasdotme@gmail.com/
[5]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-doc/20251013095630.34235-2-bagasdotme@gmail.com/

-- 
An old man doll... just what I always wanted! - Clara

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