Syzbot To Mainline: How I Merged 21 Kernel Patches as a First-Time Contributor
Talkat Open Source Summit India 2026 · on Wednesday, 2026-06-17· at 13:40· Jasmine Hall 2 (Level 3)·
summary
21 patches across 15+ kernel subsystems (ext4, gfs2, btrfs, ocfs2, f2fs, mm, tracing, networking, BPF) merge to mainline using syzbot reports as seeds. Fixes include adding a missing length check to avoid divide‑by‑zero, inserting an existing run_close on error paths to fix an NTFS leak, toggling ext4 inline flags in setattr, initializing a specific batch.kind field for KMSAN, and removing a stray kfree after conversion to a flex array. Workflow uses checkpatch.pl, git, get_maintainer.pl and git-send-email.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Kernel contributions intro
- 1:04Newcomer starting points
- 2:09Syzbot and kernel debugging
- 6:22Fixing code style first
- 7:24Oops bug with simple check
- 7:47NTFS 3 memory leak
- 9:52EXT4 inline data bug fix
- 14:07IOMMUFD uninitialized memory
- 16:12KASAN GID table bug
- 18:59Writing kernel patches
- 20:46Summary and next steps
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