"The kernel newbies community often gets inquiries from CS students who need a project for their studies and would like to do something with the Linux kernel, but would also like their code to be useful to the community afterwards," explained Rik van Riel in a posting titled "WANTED: kernel projects for CS students". He offered a link to a Kernel Newbies wiki page titled "KernelProjects" adding, "if you have ideas on what projects would be useful, please add them to this page (or email me)". Rik explained that he was assembling a list of projects on that page that meet the following criteria:

"Are self contained enough that the students can implement the project by themselves, since that is often a university requirement; are self contained enough that Linux could merge the code (maybe with additional changes) after the student has been working on it for a few months; are large enough to qualify as a student project, luckily there is flexibility here since we get inquiries for anything from 6 week projects to 6 month projects."

Matt Mackall announced the creation of the Kernel Mentors Project, "an informal project to get experienced developers to mentor new developers and coach them on the best ways to get their code ready for submission." He goes on to explain that the project's mailing list [archive] allows a place for developers to "submit a description of their project and its current state as well as pointers to the code", adding that in response "mentors will pick for themselves which projects and developers they'd like to work with and offer their assistance."

In a posting to the new mailing list, Matt further explained, "the basic idea is matching new kernel developers up with experienced developers so they can get acquainted with existing best practices." He goes on to list some goals for the project, noting that it's not a replacement for the kernel newbies or kernel janitors projects. Instead, he explains that the idea is to smooth out and better document the development process, help merge code that's basically ready for mainline, and to increase overall participation.