Linux Kernel Internships (OPW) Update

A month ago, Amanda McPherson and Greg Kroah-Hartman from the Linux Foundation asked me to coordinate an internship program aimed at getting more women to participate in the Linux kernel. In order to be considered for an internship, the applicants need to submit patches to the Linux kernel, and get them accepted.

The results have been amazing:

  • 41 women applied for 6 Linux kernel internships.
  • In 13 days, 374 patches were submitted, and 137 patches were accepted.
  • Diff stat for accepted patches:
    105 files changed, 3889 insertions(+), 4872 deletions(-)

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Reporting Linux Kernel Bugs

Hooray! +Linus Torvalds pulled my first patchset sent directly to him! Usually I send +Greg Kroah-Hartman patches, and he sends a pull request to Linus. It’s a trivial thing, but it means my pull request flow is fine for more than one maintainer. 🙂

ReportingBugs looks much better now, and I hope this rewrite will help explain who to contact about bugs, and what time frame to expect responses back.

Linux Kernel Internships for Women

Want a summer internship working on the Linux kernel?

Internships are available for women and genderqueer/genderfluid people for summer 2013, from June to September. They come with a $5,000 stipend.

We have some pretty awesome projects and helpful mentors, so please apply to the FOSS Outreach for Women (OPW) page.

Please complete your initial application by May 1st. We’re still working on some details, so you’ll be able to update your application until May 17th.

Please share this with any of your friends that might be interested!

Update: If you’re interested in being a mentor for kernel interns in any capacity, or helping review applications or documentations, please let me know. My email is in MAINTAINERS.

xHCI spec is up!

I’m pleased to announce that the eXtensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) 1.0 specification is now publicly available on intel.com. This is the specification for the PC hardware that talks to all your USB 3.0, USB 2.0, and USB 1.1 devices. (Yes, there are no more companion controllers, xHCI is the one host controller to rule them all).

Open, public documentation is always important to the open source community. Now that the spec is open, anyone can fully understand my Linux xHCI driver (although it’s currently only compliant to the 0.96 xHCI spec; anyone want to help fix that?). This also means the BSD developers can implement their own xHCI driver.

Curious what a TRB or a Set TR Deq Ptr command is? Want to know how device contexts or endpoint rings work? Go read the spec!

LCA 2010

My Linux Conference AU slides are now posted on my server. The USB 3.0 talk went really well, and I look forward to sharing it when the LCA videos go up in the next couple weeks.

LCA was a total blast! The speakers were wonderful, and I really felt integrated into the conference and social events by the techie women of LCA. Thank you to Sara, Jo, Jacinta, Liz, and all the other Haecksen of LCA2010!

The only downside is the weather. It’s really quite rainy here, although it’s 10-15 degrees warmer than Portland. I think Jamey and I are going to skip the Tongariro Crossing and go straight to the glow worm caves at Te Kuiti/Waitmo. At least we’ll be in a cave while it’s raining!

A New Years Update

*tap tap* Is this thing on?

Choose your excuse:

I haven’t posted in about six months, because

a. I bought a house,

b. I acquired two cute kittens (Derek and Elisa),

c. The acquired house needed a ton of work, including taking down a 30 foot “hedge” in the backyard,

d. I’ve been experimenting with all kinds of cooking,

e. I’m lazy.

What’s next for me?

I’m presenting about Linux USB 3.0 support at Linux Conf AU 2010. If you’re going to LCA next week, you can check out my talk at Friday at 10:30am in the Ilott Theatre. I’ll have a USB 3.0 demo for the brave souls that make it to morning talks. ^_^ If you miss it due to being hung over or not being able to attend LCA, I believe they’ll be video taping it.

LCA is being held in Wellington, New Zealand, this year. Jamey and I are going bike camping for two weeks afterwards. As Martin Short put it, “I planned a spontaneous adventure.” Let’s hope Captain Ron doesn’t screw it up. 😉

Any suggestions of cool things to see on the North Island? We’re probably going to National Park, Te Kuite, Auckland, and the Coromandel Peninsula. Anything else in that general area?

USB 3.0 support: coming soon to a Linux kernel near you!

#tags usb,usb3,linux,open source

The xHCI (USB 3.0) host controller driver and initial support for USB 3.0 devices is now publicly available on my kernel.org git tree. Greg Kroah-Hartman has queued the patches for 2.6.31, so Linux users should have official USB 3.0 support around September 2009. This is impeccable timing, since NEC recently announced they’ll be producing 1 million xHCI PCI express add-in cards in September.

This means that Linux will be the first operating system with official USB 3.0 support. I’m working with Keve Gabbert (the OSV person in my group at Intel) to make sure that Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat pick up the xHCI driver. Advanced users can always compile their own kernel on a standard distro install.

I hope that some USB 3.0 vendors who have prototypes will test with my driver. Instructions on how to compile a kernel using my git tree will follow.

This is a giant project that I’ve been working on for the past year and a half. It’s gratifying to see the code finally released, and exciting to know that hardware is on its way.

Debugging with printks over Netconsole

Image Copyright saschaaa -- http://flickr.com/photos/saschaaa/152502539/Netconsole is a powerful Linux kernel debugging tool. The dmesg output from a machine under test is transferred over an ethernet link (via UDP packets) to another machine. That means that you can see the debugging messages from the test machine on the screen of another machine. Netconsole isn’t good for debugging early kernel panics, but it is very useful if your new kernel driver hangs your system.

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