Linux Kernel Development with Shuah Khan

Open Source Archives - Software Engineering Daily

An operating system kernel manages the system resources that are needed to run applications. The Linux kernel runs most of the smart devices that we interact with, and is the largest open source project in history.

Shuah Khan has worked on operating systems for two decades, including 13 years at HP and 5 years at Samsung. She has worked on proprietary operating systems and a variety of Linux operating system environments, including mobile devices. Shuah joins the show to discuss her work within Linux and her experience contributing to open source.

Shuah has made significant contributions to kselftest, a set of tests for Linux. Testing the Linux kernel is complicated. Because there is so much depth to the codebase, and such a variety of ways that Linux can be used, there is also a variety of ways that the operating system gets tested. There is smoke testing, performance testing, and regression testing. There are trees of tests, and as a developer you may only want to run a subset of the tests in that tree.

The conversation with Shuah ranged from the low level practices of testing the kernel to a high level discussion of how the Linux kernel can reveal dynamics of human nature.

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