My first patch to the Linux kernel
118 points
2 days ago
| 8 comments
| pooladkhay.com
| HN
dingensundso
3 minutes ago
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Nice blogpost. Was an really interesting read. Would be interesting to read about the experience of getting the patch accepted and merged.

One thing I noticed: The last footnote is missing.

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NotCamelCase
5 minutes ago
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Lovely article with a happy ending!

One thing that I am glad to have been taught early on in my career when it comes to debugging, especially anything involving HW, is to `make no assumptions'. Bugs can be anywhere and everywhere.

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ashwinnair99
3 hours ago
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The first one always takes way longer than the code itself deserves. Most of the work is figuring out the unwritten rules, not writing the patch.
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fooker
2 hours ago
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This is a big problem in open source that seems taboo to discuss.

In my opinion, unwritten rules are for gatekeeping. And if a new person follows all the unwritten rules, magically there's no one willing to review.

I think this is how large BFDL-style open source projects slowly become less and less relevant over the next few decades.

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cromka
2 hours ago
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Agreed. The level of aggressive gatekeepers is just crazy, take Linux ARM mailing list for example. I found the Central and Eastern Europeans particularly aggressive there and I'm saying this as on myself. They sure do like to feel special there, with very little soft skills.
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tossandthrow
38 minutes ago
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This will likely be alleviated when Ai first projects take over as important OSS projects.

Fir these projects everything "tribal" has to be explicitly codified.

On a more general note: this is likely going to have a rather big impact on software in general - the "engineer to company can not afford to loose" is likely loosing their moat entirely.

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yu3zhou4
2 hours ago
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Can confirm that it also happens in other complex systems! Still a lot of good time and the novelty factor helps with pushing through
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seb1204
2 hours ago
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Sand that after so many years these rules are still not written down.
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ngburke
1 hour ago
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Sign extension bugs are the worst. Silent for ages then suddenly everything is on fire. Spent a lot of time in C doing low-level firmware work and ran into the same class of issue more than once. Nice writeup, congrats on the patch.
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foltik
2 hours ago
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Well done and great writeup! Any idea why the bug hadn’t shown up sooner, like when running self tests?
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knorker
30 minutes ago
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Integer promotion rules in C are so deceptive.

I don't believe there's anybody who can reason about them at code skimming speeds. It's probably the best place to hide underhanded code.

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yu3zhou4
2 hours ago
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Congrats and happy for you, you had a lot of fun and did something genuinely interesting
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mbana
2 hours ago
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I love these kind of posts.
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