Some departures from linux-next [LWN.net]

In his role as the maintainer of the linux-next tree, Stephen Rothwell has a comprehensive view of development activity across the kernel. He has recently announced his intention to drop a number of repositories that have been inactive for a year or more from linux-next. The list is interesting, as it highlights areas of past (and possibly present) interest where development activity has come to a halt.

The trees being removed are:

APM (the obsolete power-management mechanism).
The bcm2835 driver.
kgdb: merged, and, presumably, not needing further work.
lblnet (labeled networking, also merged).
llvmlinux (building the kernel with the LLVM compiler).
mips-fixes; MIPS patches follow other paths now.
MMC: MultiMediaCard device support. MMC patches seem to go via other trees now.
Random-number generation.
rpmsg: the remote processor messaging subsystem.
The squashfs compressed filesystem.
Tiny, the home of the kernel tinification project.

So far, none of the maintainers who have responded have objected to the removal of their trees. That does not necessarily mean that the projects are dead; as Stephen pointed out, adding the trees back to linux-next is easily done should they become active again.