It’s definitely something on my bucket list too. Delighted at recent rust developments as a result cause I know zero c
Compared to Rust, C is pretty easy
My first contribution to Linux
31–40 of 92 posts
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#32If I had no problem with devoting the time and money, contributing to the kernel (especially in a topic as obscure as making the extra buttons work on a 20-year-old laptop) is at the top of my bucket list, and I am definitely going to be doing it in the near future when my calendar clears up a bit. Exquisite write-up and OP's simple writing has a motivating ring to it, and I'm now on the local used marketplace lookin…
That's the spirit! :-)
By the way, delving into obscure and hardware-specific kernel code, sometimes yields quite interesting generally-applicable problems. For example, @dougg3 did an (excellent!) series of articles about his work on bringing mainline kernel support to "Chumby 8", a somewhat obscure, but historically significant piece of hardware, and as a side-quest he stumbled into this:
https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2024/04/why-is-my-cpu-usag...
...which is applicable to quite a few other machines.
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#33This was encouraging! Thanks for explaining the process!
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think 100% compatibile [sic] working would be launching bloatware installed by the manufacturer. Making a physical button work requires bloatware in your understanding? > I'm happy not to have the pavlovian training that may some day cause me to click one of these things on someone's windows machine. Do you know what you're trying to say here? I do not.
You can obviously map arbitrary key codes however you want on a custom OS and have extremely little fear of someone having embedded nonsense down to the bios. On windows many of these laptop buttons were added like the Yahoo browser bar to specifically work with bloatware that might go on to make a meaningful action for non malicious software as well as what it is really for. I prefer not to be in the habit of pressi…
> I prefer not to be in the habit of pressing footguns given that I might occasionally be placed in front of a consumers windows laptop that no one cleaned.
If you're this anxious about security, you might not want to be anywhere near a Windows machine.
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#35Well written! Enjoyed the detailed report.
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can obviously map arbitrary key codes however you want on a custom OS and have extremely little fear of someone having embedded nonsense down to the bios. On windows many of these laptop buttons were added like the Yahoo browser bar to specifically work with bloatware that might go on to make a meaningful action for non malicious software as well as what it is really for. I prefer not to be in the habit of pressi…
> I prefer not to be in the habit of pressing footguns given that I might occasionally be placed in front of a consumers windows laptop that no one cleaned. If you're this anxious about security, you might not want to be anywhere near a Windows machine.
I'm also looking forward to telling a driver that I never I wanted to be near cars when they eventually run me down.
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#37If I had no problem with devoting the time and money, contributing to the kernel (especially in a topic as obscure as making the extra buttons work on a 20-year-old laptop) is at the top of my bucket list, and I am definitely going to be doing it in the near future when my calendar clears up a bit. Exquisite write-up and OP's simple writing has a motivating ring to it, and I'm now on the local used marketplace lookin…
If you want to find devices that still need hardware support under Linux, I highly recommend trying to get a mobile Linux distribution to work on an old smartphone or tablet.
postmarketOS in particular has a really good devices page [1] showing missing feature support at a glance, as well as guides for porting to new devices [2] and porting features from an outdated vendor-provided Linux fork to the upstream kernel [3].
[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices [2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Porting_to_a_new_device [3] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Mainlining
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#38Wait… Koskivuori? Well of course they took his Linux patch right away, this is blatant Finnish favoritism! Imagine if some poor Estonian tried similar…
;-)
Just kidding, very cool to see a blow by blow of landing a Linux patch. I felt similar excitement landing a mere emacs patch.
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#39I've never really done anything with the kernel, and at this point it feels kind of overwhelming to start contributing.
I'm sure if I went to the source tree and asked people for a low-hanging-fruit task someone would be kind enough to guide me to get started, but it's still kind of overwhelming to a point where I've just avoided it.
I should probably should stop coming up with excuses and just do it, as I would like to do a lot more with filesystems and having an understanding of the kernel would probably help with that.
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#40This is a nice writeup. I hope we see more great blog posts from this person here in the future.
At the bottom, there is a timeline, and I noticed this entry with a LWN link:
> 2025-05-27: Sasha Levin selects my patch (and a few others) for backporting...
The new version of this tool (AUTOSEL) looks very interesting!
> AUTOSEL leverages modern large language models and