Re: seeking beginner-friendly mm bugs to work on

[Harry Yoo <harry.yoo@oracle.com>]

On Sat, May 17, 2025 at 04:01:51PM +0530, Dileep Sankhla wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> Thank you all for improving, enhancing, and maintaining the memory
> management subsystem.
> 
> I am new to Linux kernel development. Until now, I have only one
> contribution that fixes the checkpatch.pl warning. I have also
> attempted to create my own 64-bit Unix-like kernel from scratch for
> x86-64 PCs. I worked on implementing a physical memory manager and I
> also experimented with 64-bit paging.
> 
> I want to begin solving a few beginner-friendly bugs. I searched
> bugzilla but I don't know which ones are for beginners like me. Could
> you guys help me in seeking bugs to work on?

Hi, Dileep.

I don't think we keep a list of newcomer-friendly bug—instead, we fix them
as they appear.

However, if you want to discover MM bugs, I believe the most effective
way to find them is to extensively test mm-new [1] branch each week.
I’ve discovered and fixed several bugs that way, and the community values
this kind of testing.

[1] https://web.git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm.git/log/?h=mm-new

Once you're comfortable testing mm-new and discovering bugs, you may
want to start reviewing new patches as well; New code often introduces
bugs, and some issues can pass testing but become obvious (and get caught)
during code review.

-- 
Cheers,
Harry / Hyeonggon