16 years since my first patch to the Linux kernel

16 years ago today, after watching a presentation on YouTube titled “Write and Submit your first Linux Kernel Patch” by Greg Kroah-Hartman, I submitted my first patch1 to the Linux kernel. 🐧🙂



I didn’t really have much idea of what I was doing, and after submitting a few more similar patches that same year (2010), I stopped.

Years later, in 2017, I picked it up again, and haven’t stopped since!🐧⚔️🛡

If you’ve contributed a few patches to the kernel but haven’t submitted in a while, give it another go. You never know what opportunities the future might bring. 🙌🏼

If you’ve never contributed to the kernel before and have some experience with C, you’d probably want to start here.

  1. Staging: comedi: drivers: fix coding style issues in das08.c ↩︎

Gustavo A. R. Silva
Gustavo A. R. Silva works full-time as an Upstream Linux Kernel Engineer focused on hardening and proactive security. He has spent the past several years fixing all sorts of bugs and hardening the Linux kernel. His work is supported by The Linux Foundation and the Alpha-Omega project. He’s a member of the Linux Kernel Self-Protection Project, and a regular speaker at Kernel Recipes and Open Source Summit. He has also presented at Linux Security Summit, Lund LinuxCon, Linux Plumbers Conference, Everything Open, The University of Adelaide, and Symposium sur la Sécurité des Technologies de l’Information et des Communications (SSTIC) as an invited speaker.

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