kernel

Mini How-To

Where to begin?

I fre­quently get asked how I man­aged to end up work­ing on the Fedora ker­nel for liv­ing by peo­ple hop­ing to one day get into ker­nel hack­ing them­selves. One of the most com­mon things I hear is that the ker­nel is so big, how could any­one pos­si­bly under­stand it all? Truth is, there are very few peo­ple that really under­stand the whole ker­nel. The major­ity of the ‘big name’ ker­nel hack­ers got where they are today by spe­cial­is­ing in one thing, and branch­ing out. There are excep­tions to this of course, with a num­ber of peo­ple like Andrew Mor­ton, Alan Cox, and Linus who are ‘all rounders’, who have hacked on close to every­thing in the tree at some point. Whilst the ker­nel could always use more peo­ple like these super­heros, there is noth­ing wrong with becom­ing a spe­cial­ist in one area. Read more…