Open Source Summit Europe 2025

End 2020 I became the maintainer of the drivers/platform/x86 (pdx86) kernel subsytem. The subject of this talk is my experience in creating a friendly welcoming environment, growing the pdx86 community and how this helped me to avoid burnout by being able to delegate to community members.

Keywords:
- Making your mailinglist a friendly welcoming medium
- Patience is a virtue
- Leading by example
- Growing a community
- My personal experience with burnout
- External (non kernel-devel) stress factors
- Delegating
- Handing over the reins

The -Wflex-array-member-not-at-end compiler option was introduced in GCC 14. At the time, it revealed around 60,000 warnings in the upstream Linux kernel. While many of these were duplicates, about 650 are unique and require individual auditing and attention. These issues span different categories and vary in complexity, which adds to the challenge of globally enabling this compiler option in the upstream Linux kernel.

In this presentation, we'll share the progress we've made on this work as part of the Kernel Self-Protection Project (KSPP) over the past few months. We'll go over the challenges we've encountered, show concrete code examples, and demonstrate how to fix these kinds of problems. We'll also discuss why enabling this option is important for the kernel, and how we plan to complete this work in the near future.

Whether you're a seasoned kernel developer or someone looking to start contributing upstream, this presentation will introduce useful helpers and strategies you can use to fix existing code or implement new functionality, and in doing so, help us harden the upstream Linux kernel for the benefit of everyone.

Open source project repositories often expose more than developers intend - and not just the occasional leaked password. In many cases, careful analysis of public Git histories can uncover traces of vulnerabilities being fixed days or even weeks before an official security advisory is published.

In this talk, Marta will present findings from research into the repositories of several high-impact open source projects, revealing how fix commits often hint at upcoming security disclosures.

She will then share practical advice on how to reduce this kind of information leakage - helping maintainers better protect their projects and users from premature exposure.

Attendees will be given an USB (ch341t) to qwiic converter + a qwiic sht40 temperature/humidity sensor.

A github repo with preparation instructions + a ready-to-build driver to instantiate an i2c-device/-client for the sensor will be provided.

The goal of the workshop is for attendees to write their own (very simple) kernel driver for the sensor offering sysfs attributes providing temperature and humidity readings. Example code snippets of a skeleton i2c-driver and example communication code will be provided to make it possible to write a simple driver in 2 hours.

Attendees will be expected to know the C-programming language at an intermediate (or better) level.