by pankalog on 10/9/25, 5:53 PM
If I had no problem with devoting the time and money, contributing to the kernel (especially in a topic as obscure as making the extra buttons work on a 20-year-old laptop) is at the top of my bucket list, and I am definitely going to be doing it in the near future when my calendar clears up a bit.
Exquisite write-up and OP's simple writing has a motivating ring to it, and I'm now on the local used marketplace looking for pieces of tech like this :-)
by bojle on 10/10/25, 8:19 AM
I am doing the same but with LLVM. For starters, I filtered issues with the "good first issue" label and found something to work on [1]. It took 2 months in review and about a month to research and write the code. Finally got merged yesterday. I am writing about it so that when someone else bumps into the same problem, they hopefully take 1 hour instead of 1 month. Compilers, like the kernel, are a lot of fun!
[1] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/154914
by MomsAVoxell on 10/10/25, 8:17 AM
My favourite contribution to the Linux kernel, which I witnessed myself, was a 1-character fix to a macro that my boss found, related to reading ADC, and which we spent two weeks checking and double-checking and re-double-checking to be
sure that it was actually a bug.
It was, he submitted it, and that one character fix got him into the contributors file .. we were all highly amused, because that particular boss didn't program much, but found the bug during testing and it was, nevertheless, a huge win for him .. ;)
EDIT: it was a 2-character fix. ;)
https://lkml.iu.edu/2103.2/08109.html
(W., if you read this, I still love telling the story of how you found this bug..)
by jw_cook on 10/7/25, 4:24 AM
This was a fun read, and well written. Thanks for sharing! Adding/improving support for some niche piece of hardware sounds like an ideal way to get started with kernel development, and something I'd like to try myself sometime.
by kwar13 on 10/10/25, 12:16 AM
Having your name as a Linux contributor is the highest level of accolade I can think of when it comes to being a programmer.
by caminanteblanco on 10/9/25, 5:13 PM
This was an absolutely awesome post, and it makes me want to do the work to fix the functionality on my Lenovo laptop. Though I'm sure the Lenovo drivers are a little more closely watched, so I'll make sure to do my due diligence first. Thank you for the write up!
by matheusmoreira on 10/9/25, 5:51 PM
That was so cool!
I too went on this adventure with my laptop. Sadly I hit a wall while reverse engineering the ACPI stuff. With no logs, error messages or tools on the Windows side to intercept the ACPI events, I was at a loss but eventually gave up. Massive respect for managing it with your own laptop!!
I did manage to reverse engineer the keyboard's LEDs and drive them from user space! Studied the kernel to make a contribution but decided not to do so when I saw comments saying it is better to keep functionality in user space if at all possible.
by schnitzelstoat on 10/6/25, 1:11 PM
This was really interesting! I've often wondered how one would do such a thing.
Seeing your name in the Linux changelog must be awesome!
by sph on 10/10/25, 7:53 AM
Thank you for this. I have a USB desktop speaker whose volume controls don't work and I was thinking of writing a patch, but didn't know where to start; now I do.
by throwaway2037 on 10/9/25, 11:27 PM
This is a nice writeup. I hope we see more great blog posts from this person here in the future.
At the bottom, there is a timeline, and I noticed this entry with a LWN link:
> 2025-05-27: Sasha Levin selects my patch (and a few others) for backporting...
https://lwn.net/Articles/1020203/ ... which leads to a LKML link:
https://lwn.net/ml/all/aBj_SEgFTXfrPVuj@lappy/The new version of this tool (AUTOSEL) looks very interesting!
> AUTOSEL leverages modern large language models and
embedding technology to provide significantly more accurate recommendations.
by jraph on 10/9/25, 6:31 PM
I've been procrastinating a trivial fix for years, thanks for having listed the commands to run to format and send the patch, that might help me find my way out from procrastination because this is exactly what's been blocking me.
by tombert on 10/9/25, 10:47 PM
I've never really done anything with the kernel, and at this point it feels kind of overwhelming to start contributing.
I'm sure if I went to the source tree and asked people for a low-hanging-fruit task someone would be kind enough to guide me to get started, but it's still kind of overwhelming to a point where I've just avoided it.
I should probably should stop coming up with excuses and just do it, as I would like to do a lot more with filesystems and having an understanding of the kernel would probably help with that.
by rvz on 10/9/25, 5:30 PM
This is the easiest way to hire engineers with high quality open source contributions with a public track record.
All it takes is just to check that the commit shows up in upstream projects such as Linux and anyone can see the code, the reviews and the authors email in the AUTHORS file which verify that this contribution / patch is indeed from the author who committed that change.
This is a very old form of social proof which saves lots time and makes Leetcode redundant. (Which can now be completely cheated with LLMs.)
by alexchantavy on 10/9/25, 8:27 PM
Neat! I don't know much about the Linux ecosystem so I didn't realize how Linus himself is still so deeply involved in the day-to-day review and release process.
by VALTIELENTINE on 10/10/25, 12:24 PM
Fantastic read! I've alas been frightened of contributing to the Linux kernel in spite of my interests, this instills both confidence and inspiration while serving as a simple "guide" on how to even approach debugging a hardware issue. I particularly like how the author expresses his nervousness in submitting the patch as he recognizes the importance of the work of the maintainers
by zephyreon on 10/10/25, 12:52 AM
This was a great read. Congratulations on your first contribution to the kernel!
by whoami730 on 10/9/25, 6:48 PM
Such a lovely read and extremely well written! Thanks for the post.
by eduction on 10/9/25, 10:19 PM
Wait… Koskivuori? Well of course they took his
Linux patch right away, this is blatant Finnish favoritism! Imagine if some poor Estonian tried similar…
;-)
Just kidding, very cool to see a blow by blow of landing a Linux patch. I felt similar excitement landing a mere emacs patch.
by ddtaylor on 10/9/25, 6:25 PM
Great write up and easy to follow. I appreciate the extra details related to related things.
by indigodaddy on 10/9/25, 6:13 PM
I like your website design! Have you documented the design/setup anywhere?
by glaze on 10/10/25, 1:15 PM
Nice, torille!
I also got my first and so far only kernel patch submitted years ago:
On my MacBook Pro 2010 with GeForce 320M running any OpenGL application, even glxgears, would crash because it ran out of memory. So I dug into nouveau drm code and found out that some memory related function was using wrong code path for that GPU.
It took some time to figure out how to submit a patch but it felt nice after I got it accepted.
I didn't even know about those patch sanity-checking scripts back then, they look useful for potential future patches!
by sim7c00 on 10/10/25, 4:14 PM
cool stuff and congrats. nice reading about the whole journey to it :) always humbled by people digging so deeply into things. thanks for the writeup!
by CrossVR on 10/10/25, 12:44 AM
I wonder why they haven't upgraded the spinning hard disk to an SSD. Even on old hardware you'll find that often the HDD still presents a bottleneck.
by asimovDev on 10/10/25, 9:46 AM
congratulations. as someone who is a bit of a finnaboo and lives there, it's my dream to have had contributed something to the linux kernel. I was wondering if you used the same email for the commit as your github profile so that it shows up in the contributor list in the github mirror of the kernel and on your profile? I don't think I see the contribution when taking a quick glance at your github
by raybb on 10/9/25, 4:49 PM
Kernel development has always been a bit of a mystery to me so I really appreciate this post walking through the process.
Did you try to use any AI tools during their process?
by turol on 10/9/25, 6:01 PM
Hieno homma
by Havoc on 10/9/25, 4:20 PM
It’s definitely something on my bucket list too. Delighted at recent rust developments as a result cause I know zero c
by jkhanlar on 10/10/25, 4:12 AM
Does `usbhid-dump` show anything when pressing the buttons?
by malkia on 10/9/25, 8:36 PM
This was encouraging! Thanks for explaining the process!
by bhasi on 10/9/25, 8:48 PM
Well written! Enjoyed the detailed report.
by abrookewood on 10/10/25, 12:07 PM
That's really awesome - well done. Here's hoping you add a bunch more patches :)
by mattbillenstein on 10/10/25, 4:46 AM
Pretty cool writeup - wish I had time or need to hack on stuff like this - maybe someday ;)
by petetnt on 10/9/25, 5:12 PM
Thanks for the great write-up!