Pursuing a career in the Linux kernel domain with the help of Mentorships

Himadri CS�Inria Paris

I am going to talk about…

* What makes me a slightly interesting human being worth your attention for the next few minutes?

* My passion for Student Communities

* My fascination for Operating Systems

* My experience with remote internships for a huge open-source project like the Linux kernel

* My story of finding a way into the Systems research world

* (If you also think that kernel is fun stuff, then) How can you learn more about the Linux kernel and start contributing to it?

About me

* Grew up in Palitana(India) - an important pilgrimage place for Jainism, World's first vegetarian city, conveniently located in a dry state

* Raised by well-educated, loving and supporting parents with stable jobs in a middle-class and religious household

* Found excellent teachers and mentors at various stages of life who wholeheartedly invested their time and energy in helping me learn and grow

* Attempted(and failed) to become - a News anchor, actor, and rockstar(in that order)

* Now a Computer Scientist(in the making)

* Lived in 6 different cities and in 2 countries

* Studied at 8 different educational institutions

* Know 3 languages(and learning the 4th)

Student Communities

* Do you have well-functioning Student Communities around yourselves?

* Appreciate it, avail its benefits and contribute in sustaining them

* Absence of Student Communities is a real problem

* The case of Tier-3 Engineering Colleges in India

* The example of GEC Bhavnagar - induction of 13 Student Communities within 3 months during the COVID lock-down

Operating Systems

* "Can you even install an OS on your own?" - A professor who challenged the teenager's ego

* "Linux and Python" - The story of a bored engineer

* The realm of Linux distros and fun of customizing anything and everything

* A professor who taught the OS course so well and ignited the curiosity to dive deeper

* Eureka! The Linux kernel is open source :)

* My code will run on billions of devices? Wow!

Outreachy Internship

* Outreachy provides internships in open source and open science to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technical industry where they are living

* 3 months - internships run May to August, or December to March

* Remote - both interns and mentors work remotely

* Paid - $7,000 USD total internship stipend

[Source - https://www.outreachy.org/]

Linux Foundation Mentorship

* A structured remote learning environment to new open source developers

* Connects mentees with mentors to increase diversity and inclusion, and inject new talent into open source communities

* Can be part-time or full-time

* Can be paid or unpaid

[Source - https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/lfx/mentorship]

The Nest year

* Hired as a Research Engineer at Inria to evaluate the Nest Scheduling policy developed by Julia Lawal et al.

* Discovered the world of system benchmarking

* Learned to use tracing tools

* Crashed a couple of machines

* Created an infrastructure to efficiently test various scheduling policies on Grid5000 machines

* Attended Research conferences

* Made up my mind to sign up for a PhD

[Nest Paper - https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03612592/file/paper.pdf]

COSH

* The first research project as part of my PhD thesis

* An attempt at bridging the semantic gap between the Host and the Guest Scheduler in virtualized environments

* Successfully implemented a functional prototype of the algorithm

* Currently working on the evaluation

* Learning the nitty-gritty of technical writing

Contributing to the Linux kernel

* Archives - https://kernel.org/

* Source code - https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git

* Mailing lists - http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html

More resources about the Linux Kernel

* Kernel coverage at LWN.net - https://lwn.net/Kernel/

* Mailing List archive - https://lkml.org/

* Linux Plumbers Conference - https://www.youtube.com/@LinuxPlumbersConference

* LFLive mentorship series - https://events.linuxfoundation.org/lf-live-mentorship-series/

* Kernel Recipes - https://www.youtube.com/@Hupstream/playlists

Questions?

* Now is the best time to ask

* You can write to himadrics@pm.me for later