Kernel Field Guide

An Agent Skill that gives coding agents the working habits of experienced Linux kernel engineers. It covers driver code and teardown order, devicetree bindings and DTS, Kconfig, debugging by symptom, KUnit and kselftest, patch review and submission with correct tags, regression and bot reports, and stable, LTS, Android, and vendor trees. Guidance that changed between kernel releases is marked "since vX.Y", so it holds on older trees too.

The agent loads the short SKILL.md first and opens one of eleven reference files only when the task needs it. Three local Python scripts triage changed paths, flag deprecated driver APIs, and index a tree's Documentation/.

Example prompts

• "My I2C temperature sensor never probes on this board. Find out why."
• "Review this driver patch before I send it: check teardown order, locking, and the commit tags."
• "syzbot reported a use-after-free in my driver. Help me reproduce it, fix it, and reply with the right #syz test command."

Install

claude plugin marketplace add UtsavBalar1231/kernel-development-skills
claude plugin install kernel-development-skills@kernel-development-skills

Other harnesses (Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and more) are covered in the repository README: https://github.com/UtsavBalar1231/kernel-development-skills

Data and network use

The skill collects nothing and makes no network calls. The scripts read only the kernel tree you point them at; see PRIVACY.md in the repository.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.