For Developers: Making Patches

Signing off your patch

A ''Signed-off-by:'' tag in your commit message certifies that you wrote it or otherwise have the right to pass it on as a open-source patch.

For more information on this tag, and making patches in general, see the kernel guidelines.

Commit message format

The commit message format follows the following style:

One line summary less than 72 characters
   (a single blank line)
A multi-line or multi-paragraph message describing the change in more 
detail and, most of all, describes your motivation for this patch.

If you want to, you can include compiler output or statistics here too.

As always when coding, common sense is the most important rule and there are patches where a single line is enough or other rules apply. The goal of a commit message is always to make others quickly aware of your motivation and what you did so they can review the code with this in mind.