Mindstab.net

About 3 weeks ago Lennart Poettering posted A Plumber’s Wish List for Linux to his blog, which is one of the many Linux related blogs I read. Included on that list was a request to “expose CAP_LAST_CAP somehow in the running kernel at runtime”.

Now I’d never contributed to the Linux kernel before, but in college we had hacked on the Minix kernel to extend it and in University we had written our own kernel and implemented virtual memory, task switching, message passing and preemptive processes; so I was at least familiar and comfortable with kernel level development. Looking at this task, I immediately thought, “hey, that is totally within my capabilities and I can probably squeeze it into my schedule”.

So I did. I checked out the latest copy of the torvalds Linux repository and implemented the feature. The actual implementation didn’t take too long. Mostly looking for the right place. What did take a day or two was getting up to speed on Linux coding practices and patch submission protocol and procedure. They have a good process in place and it’s best not to step on toes so I did my research as best I could. When I was ready I sent in my patch.

Andrew Morton picked it up, asked for a few enhancements, and those submitted, added it to his -mm tree for testing. Then a few weeks later Linux 3.1 launched and the new merge window opened and today Andrew submitted his diff from the -mm branch including my patch to Linus and it was merged to his tree!

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=73efc0394e148d0e15583e13712637831f926720

I am now a Linux kernel contributor. I have a small piece of code in the Linux kernel that will ship with 3.2. It’s not huge, but I did it, and that gives me a real sense of pleasure and accomplishment. Thanks to all who helped!