Linux Foundation Training Announces A New Online Course-A Beginner's Guide To Linux Kernel Developement
Kat Rodriquez | 15 October 2019
FINAL
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SAN FRANCISCO, October 15, 2019 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced enrollment is open for a new, free, online course – A Beginner’s Guide to Linux Kernel Development.
Linux, created by Linus Torvalds 26 years ago as a “hobby project”, has become the world’s largest and most pervasive open source software project in the history of computing. The Linux kernel is the largest component of the Linux ecosystem, and is charged with managing the hardware, running user programs, and maintaining the security and integrity of the whole system. Over 13,000 kernel developers from around the world have contributed to the Linux kernel. It is a 24 hour a day, seven days a week, 365 day a year development process that results in a new release once every 9-10 weeks, along with several stable and extended stable releases. At all times, new development and current release integration cycles run in parallel.
New developers often struggle to find a way to productively engage with the Linux community. Developed by Shuah Khan, a Linux Foundation Fellow and an experienced Linux kernel developer, maintainer, and contributor, A Beginner’s Guide to Linux Kernel Development is designed for anyone interested in becoming a Linux Kernel developer and contributor. The course aims to ease the Linux Kernel Mentorship application process. It also serves as a resource for developers from companies and communities that might not be able to take advantage of the mentorship program, and want to learn kernel development on their own; as well as a resource for experienced engineers new to open source and upstream kernel development that are tasked with working with the kernel community.
“In a nutshell, my motivation is to empower new and experienced engineers to learn to work with the kernel community and become productive members of the community. I am hoping this course will help demystify the kernel development process by making it easily accessible to developers from diverse backgrounds”, says Shuah Khan.
According to Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux Foundation Fellow and Linux Kernel Maintainer, “Shuah has created a wonderful asset for new developers interested in contributing to the Linux kernel. This course is unique in that it covers both the technical aspects of submitting code as well as how the community works in order to have your code accepted easier”.
The course introduces developers to the Linux kernel development process and teaches the explicit and implicit “rules of the road”. It covers configuring a development system, git basics, writing kernel patches, testing patches, writing commit logs, sending patches, and working on feedback from the kernel community.
The course will teach the following:
- Select and configure your development system
- Overview of Linux Kernel repositories and releases
- Git basics – checking out kernel repositories and working with them
- Build your first kernel and install it
- Linux kernel Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct
- Linux Kernel Enforcement Statement
- Write kernel patches and test them
- How to communicate with the kernel community (do’s and don’ts)
- Who and how to send patches (checkpatch.pl and get_maintainers.pl)
- Re-work patches and act on feedback from reviewers.
A Beginner’s Guide to Linux Kernel Development is available at no cost, for up to one year.
About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
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Media Contact:
Clyde Seepersad
The Linux Foundation
404-964-6973
cseepersad@linuxfoundation.org
About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, OpenChain, OpenSSF, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org. The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.