Contribution to Linux Kernel

Recently I contributed to Linux Kernel Organization where I submitted five very easy patches. The patches as I said were very simple which consisted of coding style fixing and checkpatch.pl errors removal. As much as easy the patches were , I did have some trouble with the submissions mainly due to my own carelessness.

At first I took up a driver in the staging directory to clean up. I found a correction, made the correction. I made a patch. The unique this is that here we need to send emails using some email servers like mutt or git send-email and I used the latter. This is so that the patch format doesn’t change. I went and set up the requirements in my gitconfig file. Then sent the patch to the mailing list. Eventually it got accepted but I had little hurdles in between which were due to my carelessness.

My hurdles were:-

1. I wrote “fixed a coding style issue” in my subject as well as body of my first patch mail and I had to change the body of the mail writing into describing what change I had actually done. This main challenge was to reply this to the same thread. I didn’t know there was an automatic reply option that sent it to the same thread. So I was trying to the message id of the mail I had sent and all that complicating matters. Later I found out any information about a particular patch automatically goes into the respective thread.
2. When I generated other patches, (a total of five) each patch had [PATCH 1/5] [PATCH 2/5] [PATCH3/5] PATCH[4/5] PATCH[5/5] in the subject whereas it was supposed to be only [PATCH] for each patch as they were different patches. For this I had to waste some time on correcting it. I accidentally sent the reply with [RESEND PATCH] subject for all patches to the mentor only ; and I was supposed to send it to the whole group. Again a careless me!

But finally it was all good and hopefully all pass testing phases. This was a good experience for me and I really learnt to make patches. I was happy at the end of it , though they were simple patches, the efforts weren’t that simple(not difficult as well) specially as it was the first time.

Here are  steps to make patches for Linux Kernel.

Steps to make a patch for Linux Kernel

• Make the required changes and save them.

 

• Run the option “git status“. This will show the changes that are to be committed into the source.

 

• Run the options “git diff“. This shows what ever changes you have made to the code.

 

• Compile the changes by running the “make” command; make M = build PATH

 

• Run “git commit -a” option to commit the changes and enter the following fields:

1. A subject in the first line.
2. A description of what changes you have done.
3. Signed-off-by: Name <email-id> .

• Run “git log” and this shows the commit made.

 

• Run “git show” and this shows the mail form that gets generated.

 

• Run “git show –pretty = full” and this also shows us properly the changes.

 

• Run “git format-patch master..tutorial” and tadaa.. your patch is generated.

 

• Run git send-email –to <to-email-id> file.patch

And we are done with the submission of the patch as well.

 

Hope this was useful 😀 .