The 2021 Kernel Maintainers Summit [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
September 27, 2021

The Kernel Maintainers Summit is an invitation-only gathering of top-level kernel subsystem maintainers; it is concerned mostly with process-oriented issues that are not easily worked out on the mailing lists. There was no maintainers summit in 2020; plans had been made to hold it in an electronic form, but there turned out to be a lack of things to talk about. In 2021, though, a number of interesting topics turned up, so an online gathering was held on September 24 as part of the Linux Plumbers Conference.

Topics discussed by the nearly 30 developers attending this year's gathering were:

Looking back at the UMN episode; what can the community learn from the University of Minnesota's attempt to get bad patches into the kernel?
Requirements for accelerator drivers: when is it appropriate to require the existence of a free user-space implementation before accepting a driver into the kernel?
The trouble with upstreaming: even experienced kernel developers can encounter frustration getting code into the mainline kernel. What, if anything, can be done to create more uniform acceptance criteria and give developers more certainty that they will be successful?
How to recruit more kernel maintainers: a short and not hugely conclusive session on addressing the maintainer shortage.
Using Rust for kernel development: what will be needed to get the Rust for Linux patches merged?
Is Linus happy? The traditional closing session gave Linus Torvalds a chance to talk about parts of the process he would like to see work better; it was a short discussion this year.

The 2021 Kernel Maintainers Summit ended with the expression of fervent wishes that next year's gathering could be held in person.

Index entries for this article
Conference	Kernel Maintainers Summit/2021