Posts

End of Mentorship

So here we are :-) I have probably not contributed to this blog nearly as much as I should. My excuse for that is life - family matters (trying to be a good husband/father), full-time employment (getting a job as a software developer) and just writing/commenting on patches. I've had a fantastic time working on the kernel, and communicating with others in the community. In that spirit, I fully intend to carry on! Also, a big thank you to Greg Kroah-Hartman for being an awesome mentor!

My first report

First proper blog I've ever had, so not sure if I'm even writing this properly! That said, having just got my first report in, I'm struck by just how helpful and polite everyone is within the kernel community. Very positive experience so far! My first report just contained details of the patches I'd submitted, although as it turned out, one of them: https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=0766d38c656abeace60621896d705743aeefed51 was fixed but I'd taken the wrong approach to fix it, just zeroing out the two buffers (IPv4 was also affected). Eric Dumazet was extremely helpful in pointing me to the kernel's tun driver (and specifically TUNSETLINK handling) as the cause of the problem. I therefore wrote a better patch to tackle this directly, which needed tweaking again to remove an inline specifier, as I was advised by David Miller that the compiler should decide on inlining ideally. When submitting the updated patch I committed a faux pas by not crediting Eric as the...