Ask the TAB

The Linux Foundation (LF) Technical Advisory Board (TAB) is meant to give the kernel community some representation within the foundation. In a "birds of a feather" (BoF) session at the 2019 Open Source Summit North America, four TAB members participated in an "Ask the TAB" session. Laura Abbott organized the BoF and Tim Bird, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Steven Rostedt joined in as well. In the session, the history behind the TAB, its role, and some of its activities over the years were described.

Abbott started things off by noting that she is one of the newest members of the TAB, so she asked Kroah-Hartman, who is the longest-serving member, to give some of the history. At the time the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) merged with the Free Standards Group in 2007 (which he characterized as "when we overthrew OSDL") to form the LF, the kernel community was quite unhappy with how OSDL had been run. The kernel developers made a list of six or eight demands and the LF met five of them. One of those was to form an advisory board to help the organization with various technical problems it might encounter.

A perfect example of how the TAB works is in the handling of UEFI secure boot for Linux, he said. It was identified by various Linux vendors as a looming problem and the TAB did a lot of work to help resolve it so that Linux would run on those systems. Now Linux has a representative on the UEFI committee to help ensure those kind of problems do not arise again. That also is an example of the "two-way street" between the LF and the TAB; either side can bring problems to the other in order to resolve them.

Bird is also a fairly new member of the TAB; he has been on it for two years and is up for election at the Kernel Summit, which will be held with the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) in September. The TAB has ten members, each of whom serve for two years; each year five seats are up for election. The election is done as an in-person vote as the summit—something that is seen as suboptimal at this point. He said that Abbott and the TAB are working on changing that, something that Abbott would return to later in the BoF.

TAB issues

Some of the things that have come up during Bird's tenure are providing an advisory role to LPC, which is something the TAB has always done, and the adoption of the kernel's code of conduct (CoC), which was the biggest issue raised while he has been on the TAB. Before the committee to handle CoC reports was formed, he worked with the other TAB members to field the few reports that came in. Kroah-Hartman said there have been just four CoC reports over the last year.

From the audience, Frank Rowand asked about the two-way street; are there examples of how that works over the last year? Bird said that an interesting one surrounded Huawei and its placement on a US government list regarding export restrictions. People in the community were concerned about how that might impact open-source projects, especially in terms of contributions from Huawei. The LF put out a "nice, clarifying statement" on that based on input from its legal team. That is the kind of resource that the LF can provide to the community, he said.

Rostedt continued in that vein, noting that legal advice is one of the areas where the LF is quite helpful to the community. It has lawyers that the TAB can speak with; those lawyers are not the TAB's legal representation, of course, but they do provide some background and advice on various issues. That is another two-way street as both Rostedt and Kroah-Hartman said that they had spoken at various LF legal events to help fill in the lawyers on how kernel development works.

Another thing that the TAB has been involved in is providing guidance on how to deal with the GPL-violation accusations by Patrick McHardy, Kroah-Hartman said. McHardy is a former kernel developer who is using GPL violations to get in the door at companies in Germany, but the real dispute turns into a contract issue when companies sign his cease-and-desist letter. The TAB advised the LF on the issue; the advice was turned into a "nice document" that any company that needs it can get. McHardy can be successfully fought off, Kroah-Hartman said, so it is important for companies to understand how to do so. "It is not a GPL violation that is being addressed" by McHardy's efforts, he said.

TAB value

Abbott asked Rostedt, who has been elected to the TAB twice, what value he sees in it. His idea is to work on getting more interaction between certain subsystems in Linux, Rostedt said. In particular, he would like to see better cooperation between systemd and other parts of the community. He wants to help mend the relationships that have broken down between the kernel and systemd developers, for example. He apologized to the systemd developers for his role in that and they are receptive to a reconciliation. His role on the TAB and as part of the LPC committee provides resources that he can use to help mend that rift.

He also noted that there has been an effort of late to make the TAB more transparent. He and Bird have been working on publishing minutes from the TAB meetings, for example. The TAB is meant to be reactive to the problems that are brought to it, Kroah-Hartman said. For example, the kernel community's position statement on kernel modules was borne out of community concerns about closed-source modules. The TAB led the effort in putting that together.

Bird said that the LF has a lot of resources and that it is his impression that the community doesn't use those resources as efficiently as it could. The TAB would like to hear more suggestions of things that the LF could do to help the ecosystem and the community. There was a need to mentor companies about how to use and contribute to Linux at one time, Kroah-Hartman said; that was something he did a lot of using LF resources, but there isn't so much of a need for that anymore. He also pointed out that the chair of the TAB is a member of the LF board of directors, so they can directly influence LF policy that way. Bird said that he thinks there is more the LF could potentially do to help attract more members to the community, so he would like to hear suggestions on things that could be done.

Elections

Abbott then moved into the planned changes for TAB elections. At one time, it made sense to do them in-person at the Kernel Summit, but those days are behind us. Getting everyone together for a vote is difficult, so the plan is to eventually move to electronic voting so that more people can vote. The TAB is taking it a step at a time; this year, there will be an experiment with electronic voting using the same pool of people (those attending LPC). She joked that "naturally, the first thing you do when you get elected to a board is to try to change the voting".

The voting procedure was a known problem within the TAB, Bird said, but the issue came to a head as part of the work on the CoC. Multiple people mentioned the in-person voting problem as part of their suggestions when commenting on the CoC situation; that spurred more action, he said. Rostedt added that this year voting is still only open to attendees, but that the TAB will be trying electronic voting; there is a backup plan for using the regular balloting if anything goes awry.

An audience member was concerned that his employer (and likely others) didn't want its employees to contribute to open source. In fact, even doing so in his off time might be grounds for firing. Beyond that, he is unsure how to even get started with the kernel or open source. Bird suggested that anyone with Linux experience has no trouble finding another job if they wish to. Those who need a place to start will find the kernel to be a "target-rich environment", he said with a chuckle. There are lots of areas that look great on the surface but once you dig into the details, you will find lots of places to help—and not just with code.

You need to figure out "what itch you are trying to scratch", Abbott said. There are lots of directions that being a "kernel developer" might mean: do you want to learn more about hardware, about operating systems, in general, or perhaps there is some part of your day job that you want to learn more about. She always suggests that people try to find a way to tie kernel development to their job, by learning about kernel tracing, for example. That knowledge might come in handy when they encounter a problem that might be a kernel bug.

Matthew Wilcox wondered about the makeup of the TAB; it consists only of kernel developers, but there are other open-source technical communities (e.g. GNOME or Dronecode) that might need their own representation. He asked: are there any plans to open up the TAB to other communities? Kroah-Hartman said that the makeup of the TAB is part of the LF charter; there was no foundation for the kernel community until the LF was formed. "We love those other communities", he said, but they have their own foundations and organizations.

Succession

Another audience member noted the resignation of Guido van Rossum from his role in the Python community and the process of finding a new governance model. He wondered if there were any thoughts of doing something like that for Linux and what role the TAB might play in that process. There was some, perhaps nervous, laughter in the room—succession planning is a perennial topic, but the TAB is not normally thought of in those terms.

Abbott reiterated that the TAB is simply a technical advisory committee for the LF. It has no sway over the governance of the kernel itself and, in particular, it is not a steering committee like the one that now governs Python. Rostedt pointed out that the TAB has no actual power to do anything and, in reality, its influence derives from the influence of its members, not the body itself.

There has already been something of a trial run in terms of the succession question, Bird said. When Linus Torvalds stepped back during the CoC incident, Kroah-Hartman ably filled in. The kernel community's processes are "really good", Bird said, so he is not worried what will happen when Torvalds retires or whatever. The question of what happens if Torvalds "gets hit by a bus" used to come up frequently, but doesn't really get raised much anymore.

Kroah-Hartman said that there were some infrastructure glitches that needed to be worked out when he stepped in. He thought that he had the permissions needed to update the mainline tree, but that turned out not to be the case; now there three separate people who have those permissions. But succession and backup maintainers is not only an issue for the mainline; to that end, that morning Sasha Levin had put out a 5.2 stable kernel release candidate (and eventually, put out the 5.2.10 release). But, if all of those who have the credentials to update Torvalds's tree are on the same bus, "you guys are on your own and I won't care", Kroah-Hartman said to laughter.

Over the last few years, people have been thinking more about maintainers, succession, and topics of that nature, Abbott said. One part of that is the work that TAB member Dan Williams is doing on a kernel maintainer's guide in consultation with all of the maintainers, Kroah-Hartman said. Abbott added that the kernel community is looking at efforts like KernelCI to automate its processes so that it can scale without necessarily adding more maintainers. KernelCI is an example of the TAB pointing the LF at a project that needed funding, Kroah-Hartman said. The LF agreed and found companies to fund what is now an LF project for building and testing many different kernel versions on lots of different hardware.

With that, time ran out on the BoF. It provided a nice look at some of what goes on with a fairly high-profile organization in our community that often seems somewhat opaque. It is clear that the TAB is trying to change that appearance and, to the extent it can, get the word out into the community about what it is doing—and what it would like to do in the future.

[I would like to thank LWN's travel sponsor, the Linux Foundation, for travel assistance to attend Open Source Summit in San Diego.]