Faults in Linux 2.6

Regarding the "almost(?) no distros ship..." bit, in part I'm sure it depends on what you define as "distro", but IIRC/AFAIK some of the stuff in staging is actually developed/sponsored by various distros. People don't write code without a purpose, after all, and some of the distros out there have needs that the mainstream doesn't have, so write or include new code that isn't yet upto mainstream kernel quality. Sometimes this code enters the main kernel via staging.

In particular I believe a lot of the staging drivers are shipped in various arm and embedded distros, and various android technologies ship there too (there's a whole section of staging options dedicated to android), before they're considered ready for the main kernel, pretty significant given that I don't believe anyone argues any more about android being the top distro in terms of number of deployed copies. Those distros (including android) might be rather far from the top-five "desktop/server" distros that you'd normally think of, but they're certainly "distros" in the absolute sense of the term.

But more traditionally mainline distro technologies sometimes ship as staging for a period as well, and I'm sure more of them would have had there /been/ a kernel staging project/directory in the past. IIRC the recent drm/radeon dynamic-power-saving stuff was shipped first as an option only available under staging, for instance, altho the code itself was in the mainline drm/radeon directory. I'm not sure if any distros actually shipped kernels with it there as it was only there for a kernel or two, but I think some of them would have (probably with a patch transferring the option out of staging so they didn't have to enable the full staging tree to enable it) has they shipped with that kernel.

And I believe several desktop distros (particularly those with a focus on netbooks, etc) were shipping zswap and the like before they came out of staging. Indeed, AFAIK the fact that distros were planning on using the patches anyway was part of the reason they were placed in staging in the first place.

There's likely to be far more use of staging for this sort of thing in the future, introducing stuff to staging that a few distros ship because it happens to address a problem in their area of focus, before it's considered mainline kernel quality.

Duncan