Linux Kernel Submission

I think it is time to summarize my experience in the submission of bcmring architecture into the linux kernel.

You may find my contribution to the kernel 2.6.32 in the following page. Noted Broadcom ranked No. 4 by lines of changes. Mostly by me. :-)
Linux Kernel Development Statistics

1) subscribe to the arm-linux-kernel mailing list
2) send out your first email asking about other people's attitude about submit a driver/architecture
3) prepare your own git tree, better start with the latest git tree
4) port your core code into the git tree, put only the core code and the minimal amount of drivers to start, like core, dma, serial.
5) change the kernel makefile and Kconfig file to support your architecture
6) prepare a arch_defconfig configuration file, this is used to regression test the build of your architecture
7) split your patches into small chunk
8) run Lindent to make sure there is no errors nor warnings. A lot of kernel developers are picky, you'd prepared to reformat your code, rename the variables as much as possible
9) try a submission, with detailed explanation and message
10) be patient
11) get feedback and prepare another set of submission
12) ask for feedback once a week and push to get feedback, until nobody complain about your code
13) repeat until your code is merged

badly punctuated parameter list

I've encountered some strange problem like

"badly punctuated parameter list" in macro definition for C when I was compiling perl modules on Solaris platform. After my research, I found that it is due to ancient gcc, like 2.81 can't process the following macro definition.

#define my_snprintf(buffer, len, ...) snprintf(buffer, len, __VA_ARGS__)

You have to change it to a more compatible form like the following.

#define my_snprintf(buffer, len, ARGS...) snprintf(buffer, len, ##ARGS)