Checking source code style

When making changes to the source for submission to the project, the source must be in compliance with the Linux style guide. To assist with this, the project Makefile provides two targets, which both utilise the checkpatch.pl script that ships with the Linux source tree.

To check the entire source tree, you must first download copies of checkpatch.pl, spelling.txt and const_structs.checkpatch available in the Linux master tree scripts directory, then set the CHECKPATCH environment variable to point to checkpatch.pl (with the other 2 files in the same directory).

Then use the following command:

make CHECKPATCH=<path-to-linux>/linux/scripts/checkpatch.pl checkcodebase

To limit the coding style checks to your local changes, use:

make CHECKPATCH=<path-to-linux>/linux/scripts/checkpatch.pl checkpatch

By default, this will check all patches between origin/master and your local branch. If you wish to use a different reference commit, this can be specified using the BASE_COMMIT variable.