The future of the Kernel Summit

The growth in the kernel and its community, Ted said, means that it has become nearly impossible to discuss technical issues at the Summit. There is just no way to be sure that all of the right people are in the room. Meanwhile, Linus has been increasingly interested in the process-oriented discussions that have tended to dominate recent gatherings. But the Summit, as it is currently organized, isn't necessarily the best group for those discussions either.

So the 2017 Kernel Summit will be different. It will be held in Prague, co-located with the Open Source Summit Europe (formerly LinuxCon Europe). It will be a short half-day event, with far fewer people present. In particular, the attendees are likely to be approximately thirty top-level subsystem maintainers, chosen directly by Linus. They will generally be the maintainers he pulls directly from. And, naturally, this event will focus mostly on process-oriented issues.

Ted said that he still thinks it is important to have a broader gathering of kernel developers, though. Often the hallway discussions that result from simply having developers in the same place are the most important part of the event. He also said that, over the years, managers have been trained to think that it is important to send developers to the Kernel Summit, and that training should not go to waste. So there will be an open technical track in Prague as well; it will consist of some presentations, but also more discussion-oriented topics.

The end of the Kernel Summit as it has been run for so many years did not appear to bother many people, but there was some grumbling about one aspect of this plan: the co-location with the Open Source Summit. For many developers, the technical content of that event has fallen to the point where they are not really interested in attending. They would rather see the new kernel event attached to a more technical gathering, such as the Linux Plumbers Conference (as was done this year).

Ted responded that, for 2017, things are already locked in place. The lead time for event planning has gotten longer, so it's too late to change things for next year. The Linux Plumbers Conference will be in Los Angeles, co-located with the North American Open Source Summit, and that cannot be changed at this time. For the longer term, there has been a fair amount of discussion about joining the Kernel Summit with either Plumbers or the Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit. But that is for later; 2017 will be a transitional year. As 2016 was, in the end; the morning of the 2016 core day was organized much like future events might be.

Rik van Riel noted that co-location with other conferences helps to bring people into the kernel community. James Morris said that the Linux Security Summit has grown over the years, to the point that it now has over 120 attendees. This event wants to co-locate with Plumbers next year rather than with the Kernel Summit, in the theory that it will get a mix of attendees better suited to the security problem.

James Bottomley described the basic conflicts that arise when one tries to hold conferences together. If too many events are held in parallel, attendees have to choose between the sessions they are most interested in. If they are held serially, though, the resulting event becomes too long; few people are willing to dedicate more than a week to a set of conferences. Mark Brown, somewhat cynically, noted that there is an advantage to co-location with the Open Source Summit: attendees don't care if they miss it. The Open Source Summit is easy to attend even at the last minute; co-location with events like Plumbers, which routinely sells out quickly, makes it hard for last-minute attendees to come.

The session was more of an information-sharing exercise than one where decisions would be made. Kernel-oriented events are in a period of change; how that will play out will have to be seen over the next year or two.