End of the Mentorship start of new journey

 The short Mentorship reaches its end , it used to be 6 months long but in this case it was a compressed 3 months one.

The experience started with an initial filter based in a very good training available freely in the Linux Foundation site,  I think it worth mention because that Beginners' Guide to Linux Kernel has everything you need to do your first commit. Even there are others resources in Linux Foundation that are not free, I think this is the only one you need to start.

 Then started the real mentorship and the hurry to get your target of at least 5 accepted patches and that's a bit stressful:

•   first you start with syzkaller  a great tool leverage from Google to run fuzzy testing. It's a really astonishing thing because give you the kernel and the C code to reproduce the issue ... or it should because not always you get the `reproducer` (how it's called that C code to reproduce the issue) . Check this blog entry for a really good guide on how to work on that.
• The problem? maybe your could ask, ... well, you cannot always find an "easy" error to fix for someone who just start in this world, you think "How can I fix an error in nfs or ebpf ..." and you're right you cannot but there are some more accessible ones. Also you can find errors in code that don't have maintainers or that it's to be moved out from the kernel.
• Also you should pick a subsystem and start dig into and try to contribute. There are some `TODO's` for some subsystems that can guide you to what to fix, maybe more easy changes to adapt to new api inside the kernel,etc
• It's very important the way to work with the community as in this project you don't have `github` , `gitlab`, ... you just uses plain `git` and `email` , so that's will be a shock for anyone in 2025 with some experience in software but once you've all in place , you know, they are just tools.
• But important to mention is the cycle : submit , review comments, adapt code to comments,etc ... yes, is the same that in your current project ... even is kind of strange.   

 

 

Yes, is the same ... but it's the smell ... it's something different. 

 

 

So what's next ... nothing new again :-) ... keep learning and try to do some patches... btw I've one pending that I was not able even to understand what was needed but I need to understand that and maybe be able to fix.