The presence of test robots and CI rings testing the Linux kernel may be no new to most developers. Various test systems, such as 0-day, LKFT, Syzbot, Hulk robot, CKI, Buildbot, and KernelCI, mess the kernel up daily. These machines have become the top bug reporters for Linux. Yet, that doesn’t mean individual developers are unimportant for assuring the kernel works as desired.

Device drivers are a substantial part of the Linux kernel accounting for about 66% of the project’s lines of code. Testing these components is fundamental to providing confidence to the operation of GNU/Linux systems under diverse workloads. Testing is so essential that it is considered part of the software development cycle. However, testing device drivers may be hard due to many possible drawbacks such as not exposing a user space interface, architecture dependence, requirement of custom configuration symbols, etc. A fact that instigates to question: how are device drivers being tested?

Hi, my name is Marcelo, I’m a student at the University of São Paulo, a member of FLUSP and HLUSP students group, and Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student of 2019. Today, I would like to share my experience throughout the Linux Foundation GSoC project on Analog Devices AD7292 device driver. The work done during the first 3 months of the project can be seen here: Get the code. I also would like to thank my mentors: Dragos Bogdan, Stefan Popa, and Alexandru Ardelean, who have been providing me guidance from long before the GSoC program has started.

In this post, we shall go through most steps needed to build up Linux images for Raspberry Pi 3B. It is recommended to have an 8GB or larger micro SD card, Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+, and other peripherals to test the generated kernel image.

This post should serve as a guide to configure Raspbian in order to obtain an interactive terminal capable of executing commands on a Raspberry Pi that is connected to the computer through a USB port.

This is a short guide of commands used to send a patch to the Linux kernel.

In the third week of Linux Kernel development in the MAC0472 - LabXP discipline, the objective was to compile and install a version of ArchLinux in a virtual machine (VM). We (Giuliano Belinassi and I) also started developing some improvements to KWorkflow (kw), a tool that we will be using soon.

In this first week of development the goal was to prepare the environment to make contributions to the Linux kernel.