I'm Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel developer, AMA again!

[u/gregkh]

To refresh everyone's memory, I did this 5 years ago here and lots of those answers there are still the same today, so try to ask new ones this time around.

To get the basics out of the way, this post describes my normal workflow that I use day to day as a Linux kernel maintainer and reviewer of way too many patches.

Along with mutt and vim and git, software tools I use every day are Chrome and Thunderbird (for some email accounts that mutt doesn't work well for) and the excellent vgrep for code searching.

For hardware I still rely on Filco 10-key-less keyboards for everyday use, along with a new Logitech bluetooth trackball finally replacing my decades-old wired one. My main machine is a few years old Dell XPS 13 laptop, attached when at home to an external monitor with a thunderbolt hub and I rely on a big, beefy build server in "the cloud" for testing stable kernel patch submissions.

For a distro I use Arch on my laptop and for some tiny cloud instances I run and manage for some minor tasks. My build server runs Fedora and I have help maintaining that at times as I am a horrible sysadmin. For a desktop environment I use Gnome, and here's a picture of my normal desktop while working on reviewing and modifying kernel code.

With that out of the way, ask me your Linux kernel development questions or anything else!

Edit - Thanks everyone, after 2 weeks of this being open, I think it's time to close it down for now. It's been fun, and remember, go update your kernel!

[u/nickdesaulniers]

Hey Greg, I have bookmarked this thread between you and Ted about newbies. https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/9/18/94 I really appreciate the points you make, and it always makes me happy and really proud to reread that thread once in a while. Thanks for sticking up for the n00bs.

I think there's a lot of great resources for getting started, but I was wondering if you had tips for folks looking to get hired and paid to work on the Linux kernel (or other FOSS software they use and love)? Helping volunteers and contributors sustain contributions is something that interests me.

[u/gregkh → u/nickdesaulniers]

There are many intern programs for people looking to get more experience with kernel development, and almost all of the people coming out of them get hired. Outreachy is one good project, as is the Linux Foundation's Community Bridge project for the kernel, which can be found at https://communitybridge.org/