Conclusion: is Linus happy?

The final session of the Kernel Maintainers Summit is traditionally given over to Linus Torvalds, who uses the time to talk about any pain points he is encountering in the process and what can be done to make things run more smoothly. At the 2021 Summit, that session was brief indeed. It would appear that, even with its occasional glitch, the kernel development process is working smoothly.

Torvalds started by saying that the 5.15 merge window was not the easiest he has ever experienced. Part of the problem, he suggested, was that the merge window came at the end of the (northern-hemisphere) summer; much of Europe had been on vacation, and that led to a lot of pull requests showing up at the end of the merge window. In general, though, things are working. His biggest annoyance, perhaps, is having to say the same things over and over during each merge window. The core maintainers know how the process works, those in less central positions tend to make the same mistakes repeatedly; when he takes over 100 pull requests during a merge window, it can add up to a fair amount of irritation.

Overall, though, Torvalds said that the community is doing pretty well. He also feels that he, personally, is not a bottleneck who is slowing others down.

He touched briefly on the issue of the folio patches, which were not merged for 5.15. These patches, he said, are reworking a core data structure that has been in the kernel since nearly the beginning. Delaying that work for one development cycle is just not a big problem. In general, he said, if there is controversy around a pull request, he will not actually do the pull.

Torvalds closed by saying that he would like to get feedback from developers if there is any subsystem that is particularly problematic for developers to work within. He is unable to help a lot on his own when it comes to subsystems that he does not know well.

At that point, Torvalds was finished, and the group was seemingly tired. The 2021 Maintainers Summit came to a close with no further discussion.

Index entries for this article
Conference	Kernel Maintainers Summit/2021

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