Re: Status of kernel-janitors?

On Mon, 30 Mar 2026, Dan Carpenter wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 09:27:25AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > On Mon, 30 Mar 2026, Linus Probert wrote:
> >
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > I've been a long time builder and fiddler of kernel source. Running
> > > self-compiled kernels and pulling in patches before official release
> > > etc. Bog standard for most of you I assume.
> > >
> > > I'd love to dedicate some spare to help the project. Like so many
> > > others.
> > >
> > > The kernel-janoitors "project" does pop up in various resources such as
> > > kernelnewbies and I think it might have been mentioned in one of the
> > > Linux Foundations free courses. But links to potential homepages seem to
> > > be dead and resources are sometimes dated.
> > >
> > > I read somewhere that this has mostly evolved into janitorial work in
> > > drivers/staging. TODOs were mentioned.
> > >
> > > So the actual question. In my mind janitorial code work is a good place
> > > to dip ones toes when starting out. Is this the right mailing list to
> > > ask about such things? Any suggestions to find an area where ones
> > > assistance would be welcome?
> > >
> > > I'm aware of checkpatch.pl but for many drivers diverging from these
> > > rules seem intentional and just blindly fixing checkpatch warnings are
> > > not helpful to the maintainer.
> > > Open source is a lot of work so the goal would be to be helpful while
> > > not stealing too much attention from concerned parties.
> >
> >   I mention this once in a while ... *many* years ago, I wrote some
> > admittedly hacky scripts that scanned the kernel source tree looking
> > for what I considered "obvious" cleanups. One of those cleanups was to
> > abbreviate the numerous calculations of the length of an array
> > sprinkled throughout the source code,
>
> There is a coccinelle check for this already.  I don't know why it
> hasn't been done to NUM_ELEMENTS().

  ah, i should have assumed there was a coccinelle check for that. in
order to be truly comprehensive, maybe you really need to attack the
problem with an ugly regex when the pretty stuff fails.

rday