Submitting Bug Reports

If you encounter a bug, the best course of action is to write a fix, create a patch, test it, and submit it as discussed in the following sections. Of course, you can also report the problem and get someone to fix it for you.

The most important part of submitting a bug report is fully describing the problem. Describe the symptoms, any system output, and a fully decoded oops (if there is an oops). More importantly, if you can, provide steps to reliably reproduce the problem and a brief description of your hardware.

Determining to whom to send the bug report is the next step. The file MAINTAINERS lists the individuals associated with each driver and subsystemthey should receive any issues related to the code they maintain. If you cannot find an interested party, send the report to the Linux Kernel Mailing List at linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org. Even if you do find a maintainer, carbon copying the kernel mailing list never hurts.

The files REPORTING-BUGS and Documentation/oops-tracing.txt provide more information.