Re: Contributor wanting to get started with simple contributions

[Thomas Huth]

On 28/08/2020 02.49, Rohit Shinde wrote:
> Hey Thomas,
> 
> Thanks for the in-depth response! I appreciate it a lot!
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 9:38 PM Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com
> <mailto:thuth@redhat.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On 26/08/2020 17.00, Rohit Shinde wrote:
>     > Hey Thomas,
>     >
>     > I didn't really have any specific questions. I wanted to know if there
>     > was any part of qemu that I could contribute to. Qemu is
>     overwhelmingly
>     > vast and without some pointers, I felt very lost.
> 
>     Ok, that's true - QEMU is really a huge project. I'd really recommend to
>     pick some topics from https://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/BiteSizedTasks
>     first to get a feeling for contributing patches to QEMU. Since you're
>     interested in emulation, maybe the topics from the "Device models"
>     section would also be a good fit?
> 
>     >     >     I plan to stay and become a long term contributor. Is
>     there any CS
>     >
>     >     What does "CS" stand for?
>     >
>     > Computer Science :) 
> 
>     Oh, well, thanks, ok, that was too easy. I guess there are just too many
>     abbreviations around ;-)
> 
>     >
>     >     >     theory that I would need to know other than what I mentioned
>     >     above?
> 
>     I'd recommend to browse the various KVM forum presentations on
>     http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Category:Conferences to see if there is
>     something that catches your eye. You can find the recordings of most
>     presentations on
>     https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRCSQmAOh7yzgheq-emy1xA , too.
> 
>     >     >     Is it possible to "learn on the go"?
>     >
>     >     You certainly have to "learn on the go", since it is likely quite
>     >     impossible to grasp a huge project like QEMU at once.
>     >
>     > I am interested in contributing to something like device emulation.
>     > There might be lots of devices which Qemu might want to emulate but
>     > which haven't yet been emulated.
>     Sure, but I think you first need a target you're interested in first.
>     E.g. do you want to focus on x86, ARM, PPC, m68k, ... ? Depending on
>     that, you can start looking around in the hw/ directory for "missing" or
>     "TODO" items.
> 
> I am pretty familiar with the x86 architecture since I have worked with
> processors right from 8086 to the Pentium line of processors. I have a
> nice familiarity with x86_64. I have a passing familiarity with ARM and
> SPARC architectures, but not much more. So I think I would like to focus
> on the x86 architecture. I'll poke around the hw/ directory. Please feel
> free to give me pointers in the meanwhile.
> 
> Since I am new to the community, I wanted to make sure if it is fine if
> I post general questions to the mailing list and copy you?

Sure, but I'm not the right guy for x86 ;-) It's often a good idea to
have a look at the MAINTAINERS file to find people who you could put on
CC: for specific topics.

 Thomas