The 2025 Maintainers Summit

Once each year, a small group of kernel maintainers meets to discuss important process-oriented concerns that may not lend themselves well to a public mailing-list discussion. The 2025 gathering was held on December 10 in Tokyo, Japan, alongside the Open Source Summit Japan and the Linux Plumbers Conference.

LWN's coverage from this gathering is now complete; the topics discussed at the 2025 Maintainers Summit were:

• Toward a policy for machine-learning tools in kernel development: what sort of role should large-language models play in the development process, and how should that process change, if at all, to accommodate them?
• Best practices for linux-next: how can the community's integration repository be made to work better?
• The state of the kernel Rust experiment: the discussion on removing the "experimental" label for Rust in the kernel and what comes next.
• Better development tools for the kernel: an update on work being done within and around kernel.org.
• Development-process discussions: what happens if Linus Torvalds disappears, and what other topics are developers concerned about?

Group photo

Acknowledgment

Thanks to the Linux Foundation, LWN's travel sponsor, for supporting our travel to this event.

Index entries for this article
Conference	Kernel Maintainers Summit/2025

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