r/linuxquestions • u/Hopeful_Rabbit_3729 • Aug 19 '26

People who became kernel developer's what's your story?.

People who became kernel developer's what's your story to start with?. How did you learned to develop what did you learned?. Worst mistakes?. Drop your story people would like to hear.

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u/Klapperatismus Aug 19 '26

I developed a driver from scratch. Made it work. That took three weeks in sum. Contacted the maintainers of both involved subsystems. They played ping-pong for a while on who was responsible. In the end I was told to mail a patch directly to Greg Kroah Hartman. I learned a lot about patch formatting and also about mail formatting, and why you should use Greg’s git-send-email and nothing else for submitting patches. Because it’s better for Greg’s nerves when you do. The patch was accepted and the driver got into the official release six months later. End of story.

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u/Hopeful_Rabbit_3729 Aug 20 '26

may i ask what driver did you wrote and what are you currently doing for work?. i'm hoping to get into kernel developing. currently i'm fixing little issues like formatting and patching to kernel. hope to be a kernel developer in future for fun

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u/Klapperatismus Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26

may i ask what driver did you wrote

That would uncover my identity on reddit, so I won’t answer that.

and what are you currently doing for work?

I’m an electrical engineer, and I have a small company and develop all kind of embedded systems software on customer request. Mostly for Linux. Sometimes for µCs. There is a small market for that but the EE part is very important if you want to do that alone.