The 2016 Kernel Summit

By Jonathan Corbet
November 1, 2016

2016 Kernel Summit

The 2016 Linux Kernel Summit was held October 31 to November 2 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, alongside the Linux Plumbers Conference. As usual for recent years, the summit was broken into an invitation-only core day and an open "technical topics" day; the latter was planned alongside the Plumbers tracks.

LWN was present for the core-day discussions; the topics discussed there were:

Stable kernel workflow issues. What are the problems with the community's stable kernel releases, and how can things be made better?
Group maintainership models: different ways to share the work of subsystem maintenance across a group of people.
Development process issues: what is Linus unhappy about? With a significant emphasis on bug tracking.
The future of the Kernel Summit. The development community has changed since the first Summit in 2001; now the event itself will be changing too.
Kernel hardening: we have actually made some progress on increasing the kernel's ability to protect itself in the last year, but there is a lot to be done still.
The kernel thread freezer is said to be out of control. What is the problem and how can it be fixed?
Documentation; there is a big transition underway with the kernel's documentation, and some questions in need of answers.
Tracepoint challenges: the number of tracepoints is growing rapidly; are we painting ourselves into an ABI corner? With a guest appearance by Batman.

Sessions from the technical day

There were relatively few sessions in this track; much of the interesting discussion moved to a wider forum in the Linux Plumbers Conference.

Virtual-memory topics: a short but intense discussion on how the virtual-memory subsystem must evolve to function properly on current and upcoming systems.
The perils of printk(); the kernel's message-printing function has a surprising number of problems to address.

Notes posted elsewhere

Complex dependencies (Luis Rodriguez)
Task isolation (Chris Metcalf)
Audio (Liam Girdwood)

Group photo

See also: Len Brown's photos from the Kernel Summit.

[Thanks to LWN subscribers for supporting our travel to the event.]

Index entries for this article
Conference	Kernel Summit/2016