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I want to research why a Linux kernel feature appears to be missing from my Linux install by searching the Linux kernel mailing list for recent discussions on the subject. The only site that I've found that offers a search of the mailing list archives is gmane. However, searching for terms with quotes (e.g., "/usr/firmware") on gmane does not restrict results to include only the quoted phrase. Is there a more advanced search of the Linux kernel mailing list available?

drs
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    Mailing lists are atrocious compared to bug trackers http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/191961/why-do-some-big-projects-like-git-and-debian-only-use-a-mailing-list-and-not-a – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Aug 11 '15 at 08:20

3 Answers3

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You can use lkml.org to search through the archive. It's unofficial!

excerpt

In case you haven't read the titlebar of your webbrowser's window: this site is the (unofficial) Linux Kernel Mailing List archive. This mailing list is a rather high-volume list, where (technical) discussions on the design of, and bugs in the Linux kernel take place. If that scares you, please read the FAQ.

There are others as well:

Tips for searching

If you drill in enough to the lkml.org site you'll find a search box, like here for example:

Additionally I would suggest leveraging the power of Google to help with this. Most of these types of sites suck in comparison as to what you can search with using Google.

For example:

Put this in your search bar if you want to find everything on lkml.org related to NFS!

site:https://lkml.org/ nfs
slm
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    It scares all of us! – Braiam Sep 10 '13 at 15:49
  • @Braiam - yeah I don't know why they say that...it's not that bad. – slm Sep 10 '13 at 15:52
  • That's the one to sign up for if you want a personal message from Greg Kroah-Hartman telling you to "Go search the web or something". ;) – goldilocks Sep 10 '13 at 16:34
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    I haven't been able to find anywhere on lkml.org to search the archives. Majordomo doesn't seem to host any search/archives itself, just links to other archives. The search on indiana.edu seems to be broken, I can't get any results for any search term. The Dell site doesn't have the lkml archives, just Dell-specific mailing lists. And the marc.info search suffers the same problem as the gmane one: it doesn't work with quoted phrases. Additionally, it doesn't work with slashes in the search term. – drs Sep 10 '13 at 16:53
  • @drs - see my updates – slm Sep 10 '13 at 16:57
  • thanks, @slm, the google tip and the drilling down in lkml.org do exactly what I'm looking for. – drs Sep 10 '13 at 18:45
  • sometimes lkml.org show thread, but show empty emails in thread, like this: https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/8/12/532 . But then such message possible to see via google groups interface: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=ru#!forum/linux.kernel – fghj Apr 13 '16 at 15:45
  • None of these suggestions actually work. The drill-down only works for a subsection, and Google only returns a small fraction of the pages. – user239558 Oct 25 '17 at 21:30
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In addition to the places mentioned by slm, there's:

Both of which are general services that include the linux kernel list. The GMANE one has the most going for it -- click "Searching" in the side bar for an explanation of the features.

I'd love to say I knew an easy way to just download the entire archive so you could search it yourself, but I don't. You could, however, put it together with a long series of automated requests (e.g. via curl) and some html scraping.

goldilocks
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  • Thanks. As I note in the question I find GMANE's search insufficient (on the "Searching" page you reference, they say that phrase searching is planned). The Mail Archive worked pretty well, though the results were a bit inconsistent. Nonetheless, this was a helpful link. – drs Sep 10 '13 at 18:43
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While looking to download the archive I found this: https://github.com/patjenk/lkmlsentiment. I have not tried it yet.

oldhomemovie
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