Re: Academic acceptance of custom LFS & kernel builds for student developers

[Hillf Danton <hdanton@sina.com>]

On Sun, 17 May 2026 22:24:32 +0300 Dovnar Ilya <kt333459@gmail.com>
> Hi Linus and the LKML community,
> I am a 16-year-old student from Russia. Recently, I spent a year
> studying the internal architecture of GNU/Linux distributions, which
> culminated in building a complete Linux From Scratch (LFS) system and
> manually compiling a custom-configured kernel from source for my
> college project.
> Unfortunately, my college administration completely rejected my work,
> stating it has no practical value. At the same time, they highly
> praised and accepted a project from another student that simply
> focused on "Windows registry optimization and overclocking software
> presets."
> Since the academic board lacks low-level engineering experience, they
> only care about visible UI changes rather than deep architectural
> work. Could you please share your thoughts or brief advice on how a
> young developer can technically prove the sheer volume of work behind
> building an LFS system and configuring a kernel from scratch? What
> technical metrics or artifacts are the most undeniable proof of
> competency in the Linux kernel community?

Like Equestrianism, archery, or playing basket ball or football or
Swan Lake by fiddling a violin or watercolor painting, playing linux
at best makes you happy two hours or a whole afternoon, instead of
rich, famous and competitive in any shape. That is all.

Or fortrunately enough playing linux may help you earn two pieces of
bread a day, not including a pinch of salt.

Feel free to turn to Alexey Kuznetsov (grep -nr Kuznetsov net/sched) for
any thing else.

> Thank you for your time and for inspiring young engineers to look
> under the hood of operating systems.
> Best regards,
> [Dovnar Ilya]