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Comment by jakeinspace | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to be somewhat off-topic, but I have a Linux kernel bug question. I found a very small kernel bug (no obvious security implication, only affecting 32-bit builds) at work a few weeks back while working on a custom kernel patch. I sent an email to the maintainers for that kernel subsystem, but didn't hear back. I'm not quite sure if I should keep pestering them until I get a response, or if I should be doing something else to get it addressed. Any suggestions from someone with experience?

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If you are filing a bug you will be ignored (or could be ignored) forever.

If you send in a patch - you are MUCH MUCH more likely to get a response. As it should be.

What is obvious to you as a patch may not be obvious to others, so if you can write and test your patch that would go a long way towards getting things to move forward. Bug reports are noise to many maintainers (they know there are lots, their focus is on code that fixes bugs).

There are both maintainers and lists listed in MAINTAINERS (L: entries) -- did you Cc the mailing list? It might be good to bump the mailing list email if it's been several weeks, asking if there's more information you could provide.

This is for timekeeping, which doesn’t look to have its own mailing list (just points me to the vger linux-kernel mail list). I didn’t Cc that mailing list, although I could.

The LKML is still the right place to send patches that don't fall under one of the other subsystem mailing lists. When in doubt you can ask the LKML about the right place to send a patch.

Standard advice is to wait two full weeks, then bump your thread (or rebase the patch and send a v2 if there's new conflicts with the maintainer's tree).

It sounded like he just filed a bug.

It’s a 1-line patch, I didn’t send it in my initial email but maybe that was a faux pas.

I'd say sending the patch with git send-email --in-reply-to=<the header of your last email> is good. A patch is much easier to apply than write :)

Thanks! Would you recommend I send to the maintainer(s), and Cc the mailing list?

Yeah, I'd just use whatever the output of ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl says. It will also suggest any recent committers to that area of the code, which I've found useful in the past. Usually I put the maintainers as To:, and everyone else as Cc:.

What subsystem is it?

Timekeeping

You'd be surprised that some time_t bugs are actually security related.

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