Oh rejoice!

I just found out today (December 2009), that my patch from 2005 actually got included in the main Linux kernel back in Oct. 2007.

http://www.mail-archive.com/git-commits-head@vger.kernel.org/msg22779.html

This is great news and quite fun too.. Look ma’, my initials are in the kernel!

Its pretty cool to see my ~150 lines of codes inside the official Linux Kernel. What is also really cool to see, is that someone (Jeff Garzik) actually read and checked all my work, and even fixed up comments and some code standard issues. This just showed that all the FUD about “any one can stick code into the kernel” and “4 geeks in a basement dont have time to check everything” is definently disproved.
A few examples:

Original: /*We have a copper wire (or a couple of copperwires at least…. hopefully)*/
Changed to: /* We have copper */

Original: /*we have optical thingie-majiggy*/
Changed to: /* we have optical interface */

Common for both theese examples is, that my blatant attempt to sneak in comment-humor, is gunned down :). Also notice that a space is added after /* and before */, which is the coding standard (which i apparently didnt read well enough).

Also my highly advanced “ternary-in-ternary” statement:

cmd->speed     = (
        ((cfg / CFG_SPDSTS0) & 3) >= 2 ? SPEED_1000 :
        (((cfg / CFG_SPDSTS0) & 3) == 1 ? SPEED_100  : SPEED_10 )
);

is replaced with the simple equivalent:

switch (cfg / CFG_SPDSTS0 & 3) {
     case 2:
         cmd->speed = SPEED_1000;
         break;
     case 1:
         cmd->speed = SPEED_100;
         break;
     default:
         cmd->speed = SPEED_10;
         break;
}

So ive learned that Linux-Kernel coders do not appreciate unreadable one-liners as much as the perl community. (and i was just getting good at unreadable one-liners).

  - Dan