1Linux Kernel patch submission checklist 2~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 3 4Here are some basic things that developers should do if they want to see their 5kernel patch submissions accepted more quickly. 6 7These are all above and beyond the documentation that is provided in 8Documentation/SubmittingPatches and elsewhere regarding submitting Linux 9kernel patches. 10 11 121: Builds cleanly with applicable or modified CONFIG options =y, =m, and 13 =n. No gcc warnings/errors, no linker warnings/errors. 14 152: Passes allnoconfig, allmodconfig 16 173: Builds on multiple CPU architectures by using local cross-compile tools 18 or something like PLM at OSDL. 19 204: ppc64 is a good architecture for cross-compilation checking because it 21 tends to use `unsigned long' for 64-bit quantities. 22 235: Check your patch for general style as detailed in 24 Documentation/CodingStyle. Check for trivial violations with the 25 patch style checker prior to submission (scripts/checkpatch.pl). 26 You should be able to justify all violations that remain in 27 your patch. 28 296: Any new or modified CONFIG options don't muck up the config menu. 30 317: All new Kconfig options have help text. 32 338: Has been carefully reviewed with respect to relevant Kconfig 34 combinations. This is very hard to get right with testing -- brainpower 35 pays off here. 36 379: Check cleanly with sparse. 38 3910: Use 'make checkstack' and 'make namespacecheck' and fix any problems 40 that they find. Note: checkstack does not point out problems explicitly, 41 but any one function that uses more than 512 bytes on the stack is a 42 candidate for change. 43 4411: Include kernel-doc to document global kernel APIs. (Not required for 45 static functions, but OK there also.) Use 'make htmldocs' or 'make 46 mandocs' to check the kernel-doc and fix any issues. 47 4812: Has been tested with CONFIG_PREEMPT, CONFIG_DEBUG_PREEMPT, 49 CONFIG_DEBUG_SLAB, CONFIG_DEBUG_PAGEALLOC, CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES, 50 CONFIG_DEBUG_SPINLOCK, CONFIG_DEBUG_SPINLOCK_SLEEP all simultaneously 51 enabled. 52 5313: Has been build- and runtime tested with and without CONFIG_SMP and 54 CONFIG_PREEMPT. 55 5614: If the patch affects IO/Disk, etc: has been tested with and without 57 CONFIG_LBD. 58 5915: All codepaths have been exercised with all lockdep features enabled. 60 6116: All new /proc entries are documented under Documentation/ 62 6317: All new kernel boot parameters are documented in 64 Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt. 65 6618: All new module parameters are documented with MODULE_PARM_DESC() 67 6819: All new userspace interfaces are documented in Documentation/ABI/. 69 See Documentation/ABI/README for more information. 70 Patches that change userspace interfaces should be CCed to 71 linux-api@vger.kernel.org. 72 7320: Check that it all passes `make headers_check'. 74 7521: Has been checked with injection of at least slab and page-allocation 76 failures. See Documentation/fault-injection/. 77 78 If the new code is substantial, addition of subsystem-specific fault 79 injection might be appropriate. 80 8122: Newly-added code has been compiled with `gcc -W' (use "make 82 EXTRA_CFLAGS=-W"). This will generate lots of noise, but is good for 83 finding bugs like "warning: comparison between signed and unsigned". 84 8523: Tested after it has been merged into the -mm patchset to make sure 86 that it still works with all of the other queued patches and various 87 changes in the VM, VFS, and other subsystems. 88 8924: All memory barriers {e.g., barrier(), rmb(), wmb()} need a comment in the 90 source code that explains the logic of what they are doing and why. 91