Evangelizing Kernel Programming to Students and New Developers

Session information has not yet been published for this event.

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60 Minute BoF session
Scheduled: Thursday, September 14, 2017 from 7:30 – 8:30pm in Platinum A

One Line Summary

Create a community that provides students and new developers the necessary tools and opportunities to write kernel patches that get accepted upstream.

Abstract

We want to bring together people who are interested in teaching kernel programming to aspiring kernel programmers. The best way to do this is for newcomers to start work on small kernel patches that get accepted upstream, along with proper mentorship. There is much code still in the kernel for old hardware that is perfect for such work. We want to collaborate with veteran programmers to identify kernel subsystems that have lots of opportunities to ‘polish’ older, less-used code.

Tags

kernel programming, universities, mentoring, "colleges", kernel patches

Speakers

  • Biography

    PJ is a software engineer who started at Intel, working across multiple job functions. He owned the ixgbe and i40e drivers for the Linux networking stack, along with developing the original Tx multiqueue framework in the network stack. He also has worked on interrupt affinity balancing for better scalability, and even dabbled in the core x86 CPU code for new feature enablement.

    PJ is now a Principal Engineer at NetApp, where he works in the SolidFire division on their networking core and kernel optimizations.

    Outside of work, PJ likes to drive over things with his Jeep, and race his motorcycles at various tracks in the Pacific Northwest.

  • Biography

    Matthew Whitehead has been a Linux enthusiast since 1992 when he first installed the short lived Yggdrasil Linux distribution. He thinks that learning Linux kernel programming is essential to our industry and that we should do more to promote it.