Gustavo A. R. Silva

This weekend I learned that Jerry Cooperstein has retired, and while dusting off my personal blog (I will be posting regularly next year –once a month, actually), I ran into my “LFD420 Linux Kernel Internals and Development” certificate of completion, which was signed by Jerry back in May 2016.

In December of that year, I quit my job at a consulting company to pursue my dream of becoming a professional Open Source Developer. Then, exactly one year after completing my Linux Foundation training (at The Linux Foundation Training and Certification), in May 2017, I began my career in Open Source. 😀

2024 will mark my 8th consecutive year working as a professional Upstream Linux Kernel Engineer, and I feel so grateful for all the things that have happened over the years. 🐧

Thanks to all the people who have dedicated their careers to making the dream of Open Source possible. It’s really a great community, full of people who truly make a difference in the lives of billions of people around the world.

I’m so honored to be part of this family. 🙂

Hello everybody,

During this time I’ve managed to fix 151 issues in the Linux kernel. I got 16 patches upstream in May, 29 in June and 106 more in July.

The following is a list of the top ten Linux kernel developers over the last four months. I’ve managed to make it to the top three thanks to my recent contributions 🙂 :
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git/stats

The following file contains detailed information regarding the categories and types of bugs I’ve resolved, as well as the software components in which they were detected:
https://github.com/GustavoARSilva/linux-hardening/blob/master/cii/2017/reports/mayjunjul_detailed

As a result, I’ve managed to contribute to the following subsystems and architectures during this time:

Below are more links to my contributions upstream during this time:

https://github.com/GustavoARSilva/linux-hardening/blob/master/cii/2017/reports/mayjunjul_commits.log
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git/log/?qt=author&q=Gustavo+A.+R.+Silva

Also, during the last week I’ve been working with Julia Lawall on a Coccinelle script that is awaiting upstream at the moment. This script is going to help kernel developers to reduce the code size and increase maintainability, in cases where the lifetime of some variables don’t need to be extended beyond their scope. See the example below:

In the code above, the static on local variable var is unnecessary because such variable is always initialized before it can be used. So there is no need to extend the lifetime of the variable beyond its scope, which in this case is the foo() function.

I’ve managed to identify and fix more than 10 of such cases during the last month and, currently there exist around 60 more in the last linux-next tree.

Similar cases are expected to emerge in the Linux kernel in the future, as they can be easily introduced during code refactoring or maintenance.

The Coccinelle script I’ve been working on is intended to detect and fix those cases. Follow the link for more details: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/1/34

Special thanks to The Linux Foundation‘s Core Infrastructure Initiative for supporting my work. 🙂

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Gustavo A. R. Silva

Dusting off this blog

My Linux Kernel activities in May-July 2017

LFD420