Occasionally, I will forget to link something from the mailing list in this post. To see my full mailing list activity (patches, reviews, and reports), you can view it on lore.kernel.org.

Linux kernel patches

  • Build errors: These are patches to fix various build errors that I found through testing different configurations with LLVM or were exposed by our continuous integration setup. The kernel needs to build in order to be run :)

    • init/Kconfig: Adjust fixed clang version for __builtin_counted_by_ref (v1)

  • Kbuild / Kconfig fixes and improvements: These are changes that I have authored as part of maintaining Kbuild and Kconfig.

    • kbuild: rpm-pkg: Address -debuginfo build regression with RPM < 4.20.0 (v1)
    • kbuild: rpm-pkg: Fix manual debuginfo generation when using .src.rpm (v1)
    • kbuild: rpm-pkg: Disable automatic requires for manual debuginfo package (v1)
    • kbuild: Split .modinfo out from ELF_DETAILS (v1)
    • kbuild: Leave objtool binary around with 'make clean' (v1)

  • Miscellaneous fixes and improvements: These are fixes and improvements that don’t fit into a particular category but matter in some way to my other work.

    • media: rockchip: Disable VIDEO_ROCKCHIP_VDEC when compile testing for Hexagon (v1)
    • kbuild: Switch from '-fms-extensions' to '-fms-anonymous-structs' when available (v1)
    • lib/Kconfig.debug: Require a release version of LLVM 22 for context analysis (v1)
    • genksyms: Fix parsing a declarator with a preceding attribute (v1)

Patch handling, review, and input

For the next sections, I link directly to my first response in the thread when possible but there are times where the link is to the main post. My responses can be seen inline by going to the bottom of the thread and clicking on my name.

Reviewing patches that are submitted is incredibly important, as it helps ensure good code quality due to catching mistakes before the patches get accepted and it can help get patches accepted faster, as some maintainers will blindly pick up patches that have been reviewed by someone that they trust.

Issue triage, input, and reporting

The unfortunate thing about working at the intersection of two projects is we will often find bugs that are not strictly related to the project, which require some triage and reporting back to the original author of the breakage so that they can be fixed and not impact our own testing. Some of these bugs fall into that category while others are issues strictly related to this project.

Tooling improvements

These are changes to various tools that we use, such as our continuous integration setup, booting utilities, toolchain building scripts, or other closely related projects such as AOSP’s distribution of LLVM and TuxMake.

Behind the scenes

  • Every day that there is a new linux-next release, I rebase and build a few different kernel trees then boot and runtime test them on several different machines, including a SolidRun Honeycomb LX2, an Ampere Altra Developer Platform, four Intel-based devices, and two AMD-based devices. This is not always visible because I do not report anything unless there is something broken but it can take up to a few hours each day, depending on the amount of churn and issues uncovered.

  • I submitted the following pull requests:

  • I continue to upload prebuilt, fast versions of LLVM for kernel developers and our continuous integration to use.

Special thanks

Special thanks to Google and the Linux Foundation for sponsoring my work.