Academic acceptance of custom LFS & kernel builds for student developers

Academic acceptance of custom LFS & kernel builds for student developers

[кто то]

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

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

[Hillf Danton]

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]