Outreachy Developers Have Been Making Some Useful Contributions To The Linux Kernel

This past week at the Open Source Summit Europe in France there were several past Outreachy interns that shared their work on contributing to the Linux kernel and related open-source projects. Several of these projects have resulted in useful additions to the Linux kernel.

Outreachy is the program offering those from under-represented groups in tech a $5,500 paid internship to work on different open-source projects for a number of months. Those wanting to learn more can on the initiative can do so at Outreachy.org.

Some of the recent Linux kernel efforts stemming from Outreachy that were covered at the Lyon event include:

- Improve the fuzz testing within Microsoft Hyper-V drivers in the Linux kernel.

- Also on the Microsoft front, improving the Linux kernel support for running as a guest on the Hyper-V hypervisor.

- Adding support for stateless codecs within the virtual codec driver. This Outreachy intern, Dafna Hirschfeld, went on to work for Collabora following the internship period last winter.

- Adding features to the virtual KMS (VKMS) DRM driver like alpha blending and overlay planes and a second project working on vblank issues and other testing/debugging.

- Using Coccinelle within the Linux kernel for spotting unused variables/functions and fixing memory leaks, among other code issues.

More details on that via the Open-Source Summit Europe presentation.