The 2017 Kernel and Maintainers Summits
The 2017 Kernel and Maintainers Summits were held in Prague, Czechia, in
late October, co-located with the Open-Source Summit Europe. As usual, LWN
was there, and has put together coverage of the topics that were discussed
at these meetings.
The format of the Kernel Summit was changed significantly for this year. The bulk of the schedule has been moved into an completely open set of talks that ran alongside the rest of the OSS tracks; as a result, the attendance at these discussions was larger than in past years and included more people outside of the core kernel community. The invitation-only discussion has been made much smaller (about 30 core maintainers) and turned into a half-day event.
![[Charles Bridge]](https://static.lwn.net/images/conf/2017/osse/bridge-short-sm.jpg)
The Kernel Summit
Topics discussed in this year's Kernel Summit include:
- The tracepoint ABI problem another attempt to find a way to instrument the kernel without creating ABI issues in the future.
- Restartable sequences and ops vectors: patches implementing restartable sequences have been circulating on the lists for years; this discussion covered another attempt to get this feature into the mainline.
- Regression tracking, part 1: the kernel project has a regression tracker again, but he is finding the job to be challenging.
- Improving printk(): a possible redesign of the internals of this important utility function to address some performance issues.
- A kernel self-testing update: the kernel self-tests are growing, but there is more to do there.
The Maintainers Summit
- Regression tracking, part 2, a continuation of the discussion in the smaller group.
- Bash the kernel maintainers: a discussion about feedback from the community about working with kernel maintainers.
- An update on the Android problem. The Android ecosystem is full of out-of-tree code, but it would appear that things are getting better.
- The state of Linus: the traditional session where Linus Torvalds gives his view of the state of the development community.
- SPDX, cross-subsystem development, and conclusion: a few short topics to close out the discussion.
[LWN would like to thank the Linux Foundation, LWN's travel
sponsor, for supporting our travel to this event].