[Kernel-meetup] Kernel meetup summary [28th Jan 2017]

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

... and again to make sure Pankaj's notes are now archived.

Siddhesh

On Tuesday 31 January 2017 01:32 PM, Pankaj Gupta wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> Thanks for attending this very first Kernel meet-up. We all had good interactions and productive discussions.
> Below is the high level summary of things happened.
> 
> 
> * Jitendra, Siddhesh, Pankaj, Girish, Harprit, Amit Kucheria and Amit Shah attended. Introductions done.
> 
> * We started discussion about whats expected out of this meetup and asked Jitendra about his experience with
>   Banglore meetup.
> 
> * One topic came up was how new comers can send patches and contribute more or in any subsystem. Every one shared their ideas.
>   Some of the ideas were: running/test upstream kernel, read lwn, try to read patch for a bugfix in upstream mailing list etc.
>   Source like "http://eudyptula-challenge.org/" is also can be a good point to start.
> 
> * Jitendra asked experienced contributors their work-flow for day to day work. On which Amit K & Amit S replied
>   it depends on comfort level of developer on tools. But most of the developers try to reduce the development/testing
>   time by using VM's for testing unless its specific to special hardware, small config file to build only required module etc
> 
> * Siddhesh raised a point about how 'main' function is carrying alot of 'stdio.h' stuff which is not required for just
>   'Hello World' program. Roughly size of file was 10k. Though we just need 'extern int main'. All the stuff is now standards
>   and abstraction.
> 
> * Amit Shah asked a question 'Is malloc a syscall'? we discussed about syscall debugging problems by isolating the issue first
>   if its userspace or kernel issue using strace, perf etc. Then for kernel debugging ftrace and perf can give us nice ideas.
> 
> * Girish got a board and he wanted suggestions to write driver for it. Amit Kucheria gave ideas to use the board with USB
>   interface. Girsh wanted to write a driver for it. It looked like driver for not needed but learning a device driver one can try
>   simple examples from 'linux device driver' book.
> 
> * Amit Kucheria also talked about ARM BIG LITTLE mode and his work in area related. We discussed about ARM big and small
>   processor model and changes done for it in linux scheduler and governor. Amit said it started all with cpu hotplug/unplug work.
>   Intel also is trying for similar concept with Atom processors.
> 
> * At the end we talked about how we plan for future meet-ups. Idea on most of us agreed is we go with the session approach
>   where we can discuss some topic, on any good issue fixed, feature work going, any interesting patch.  Also session on basic
>   stuff for newcomers. Also, we should ask new people who will join to come up with little homework to limit the audience to interested
>   folks.
> 
> Please add if I missed any details.
> 
> Best regards,
> Pankaj
>    
>  
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