Zack's Kernel News

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.

- Zack Brown

When the Process Is the Feature

The Linux kernel development process has undergone many changes through the years. Linus Torvalds was the first to understand how to run an open source project. The GNU General Public License (GPL) had existed for years, but the GNU projects that used it were isolated, and potential contributors were largely turned away. Linus’s great innovation was to encourage people of all skill levels to chip in, resulting in such an increase of development speed that pretty soon the entire open source world burst into existence. The Linux kernel was really where all of that started.

Since then, the kernel development process has followed its own evolutionary processes, with subsystem maintainers feeding patches for inclusion in the source tree up through highly trusted “lieutenants” to Linus. At a certain point, Linus also switched from simply releasing new versions of the kernel to using actual revision control, first the proprietary BitKeeper tool and then Git, which Linus wrote himself specifically to deal with the BitKeeper owner revoking permission to use the tool.

Among the many changes to kernel development over the years, one of the thorniest has been the struggle to balance stability with new development. It seems to be widely accepted wisdom that developers much prefer writing new features than stabilizing and maintaining those features over the long term. Linus tried several approaches to solving this dilemma. At one point, he alternated between a very long development cycle and a very long stabilization cycle. But the period of stabilization was quite painful for many, and he iterated quite a bit on finding a better method.