Linux Kernel patch submission checklist
Here are some basic things that developers should do if they want to see their kernel patch submissions accepted more quickly.
These are all above and beyond the documentation that is provided in Documentation/SubmittingPatches and elsewhere regarding submitting Linux kernel patches.
- Builds cleanly with applicable or modified CONFIG options =y, =m, and =n. No gcc warnings/errors, no linker warnings/errors.
- Passes allnoconfig, allmodconfig
- Builds on multiple CPU architectures by using local cross-compile tools or something like PLM at OSDL.
- ppc64 is a good architecture for cross-compilation checking because it tends to use `unsigned long' for 64-bit quantities.
- Check your patch for general style as detailed in Documentation/CodingStyle. Check for trivial violations with the patch style checker prior to submission (scripts/checkpatch.pl). You should be able to justify all violations that remain in your patch.
- Any new or modified CONFIG options don't muck up the config menu.
- All new Kconfig options have help text.
- Has been carefully reviewed with respect to relevant Kconfig combinations. This is very hard to get right with testing -- brainpower pays off here.
- Check cleanly with sparse.
- Use 'make checkstack' and 'make namespacecheck' and fix any problems that they find. Note: checkstack does not point out problems explicitly, but any one function that uses more than 512 bytes on the stack is a candidate for change.
- Include kernel-doc to document global kernel APIs. (Not required for static functions, but OK there also.) Use 'make htmldocs' or 'make mandocs' to check the kernel-doc and fix any issues.
- Has been tested with CONFIG_PREEMPT, CONFIG_DEBUG_PREEMPT, CONFIG_DEBUG_SLAB, CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC, CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES, CONFIG_DEBUG_SPINLOCK, CONFIG_DEBUG_SPINLOCK_SLEEP all simultaneously enabled.
- Has been build- and runtime tested with and without CONFIG_SMP and CONFIG_PREEMPT.
- If the patch affects IO/Disk, etc: has been tested with and without CONFIG_LBD.
- All codepaths have been exercised with all lockdep features enabled.
- All new /proc entries are documented under Documentation/
- All new kernel boot parameters are documented in Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt.
- All new module parameters are documented with MODULE_PARM_DESC()
All new userspace interfaces are documented in Documentation/ABI/. See Documentation/ABI/README for more information. Patches that change userspace interfaces should be CCed to linux-api@vger.kernel.org.
- Check that it all passes `make headers_check'.
- Has been checked with injection of at least slab and page-allocation failures. See Documentation/fault-injection/. If the new code is substantial, addition of subsystem-specific fault injection might be appropriate.
- Newly-added code has been compiled with `gcc -W' (use "make EXTRA_CFLAGS=-W"). This will generate lots of noise, but is good for finding bugs like "warning: comparison between signed and unsigned".
- Tested after it has been merged into the -mm patchset to make sure that it still works with all of the other queued patches and various changes in the VM, VFS, and other subsystems.
- All memory barriers {e.g., barrier(), rmb(), wmb()} need a comment in the source code that explains the logic of what they are doing and why.
