Open Source Summit India 2026

The Linux kernel can feel impenetrable to newcomers — millions of lines of code and a mailing-list workflow unlike anything else in open source. But what if there was a repeatable, beginner-friendly path in?
During my LFX Mentorship (Fall 2025), which I successfully graduated from, I merged 21 patches across 15+ kernel subsystems — including ext4, gfs2, btrfs, ocfs2, f2fs, mm, tracing, networking, and BPF — all using syzbot bug reports as my starting point.
This lightning talk distills that experience into a practical playbook for first-time contributors:

Finding your first bug: navigating the syzbot dashboard and picking approachable reports like memory leaks and missing validations.
Understanding the bug: reading KASAN/KMSAN reports, tracing call stacks, and using git blame.
Writing the fix: structuring kernel patches with good commit messages following kernel conventions.
Surviving code review: handling v2/v3 revisions and learning from maintainer feedback.

If you have ever wanted to contribute to the kernel but did not know where to start, this talk gives you a concrete, battle-tested roadmap.