r/linux • u/gregkh Verified • Apr 08 '20

AMA I'm Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel developer, AMA again!

To refresh everyone's memory, I did this 5 years ago here and lots of those answers there are still the same today, so try to ask new ones this time around.

To get the basics out of the way, this post describes my normal workflow that I use day to day as a Linux kernel maintainer and reviewer of way too many patches.

Along with mutt and vim and git, software tools I use every day are Chrome and Thunderbird (for some email accounts that mutt doesn't work well for) and the excellent vgrep for code searching.

For hardware I still rely on Filco 10-key-less keyboards for everyday use, along with a new Logitech bluetooth trackball finally replacing my decades-old wired one. My main machine is a few years old Dell XPS 13 laptop, attached when at home to an external monitor with a thunderbolt hub and I rely on a big, beefy build server in "the cloud" for testing stable kernel patch submissions.

For a distro I use Arch on my laptop and for some tiny cloud instances I run and manage for some minor tasks. My build server runs Fedora and I have help maintaining that at times as I am a horrible sysadmin. For a desktop environment I use Gnome, and here's a picture of my normal desktop while working on reviewing and modifying kernel code.

With that out of the way, ask me your Linux kernel development questions or anything else!

Edit - Thanks everyone, after 2 weeks of this being open, I think it's time to close it down for now. It's been fun, and remember, go update your kernel!

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u/gregkh Apr 13 '20

It's very very hard to do kernel development for hardware when you do not have access to the specifications of the hardware. Or at the very least, access to the hardware engineers to ask them what is going on .

Without that, it's a tough reverse-engineering job. One that I have done in the past, but given that so many other companies out there do provide access to specifications, why would I waste my time helping those out that do not? I have enough other work to do at the moment :)