The 2023 Kernel Maintainers Summit

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The Kernel Maintainers Summit is an annual, invitation-only gathering of a subset of the kernel's top maintainers. The 2023 meeting took place on November 16 in Richmond, Virginia, after the Linux Plumbers Conference. A full day of discussion covered filesystem maturity, Rust, maintainer burnout, and more.

LWN's reporting from this gathering is now complete; the discussions held were:

• Trust in and maintenance of filesystems. The kernel supports a wide range of filesystems, some of which have seen little maintenance (or use) for years. How can the kernel communicate the maintenance status of individual filesystems to users, and how can the community remove the worst of them?
• Committing to Rust for kernel code: the use of Rust in the kernel is considered an experiment that can come to an end if Rust does not work out. As more Rust code is merged, though, it is starting to look like the experimental phase is coming to an end. Is the kernel community ready to commit to Rust for the long term?
• Reducing kernel-maintainer burnout: kernel maintainers are complaining about stress and overwork; what can be done to reduce the strain?
• A discussion on kernel-maintainer pain points: Linus Torvalds talks with the maintainers about how the development community could be improved.

Group photo

Acknowledgment

Thanks to the Linux Foundation, LWN's travel sponsor, for supporting our travel to this event.

Index entries for this article
Conference	Kernel Maintainers Summit/2023

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