cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53100937
“Torvalds said that the time has come to make it harder for new people to contribute code to the kernel. People like Kroah-Hartman have spent years trying to teach people how to contribute; it is time to stop doing that, he said.”
https://lwn.net/Articles/1099594/
It is difficult to summarize exactly how Linus got to this point. Most of the discussion at this years Summit appears to have been related to AI assisted code and how the maintainers are dealing with the increase in code submissions to LKML. Many of the maintainers expressed varying levels of frustration with AI assisted drive-by code submissions. Linus’ train of thought is that they make it intentionally more difficult for humans to contribute. A later suggestion of his was to create an AGENTS. md that makes generating kernel code expensive in compute and token time.
I don’t think any of that is going to stop them from making bananas Linux kernel forks. They aren’t going to just stop generating slop. Legality, practicality and usefulness haven’t stemmed the tide of non kernel madness one bit. If they can’t submit it to the official kernel we are going to get forks where they can.
I honestly am interested in seeing what comes out of it. I’m not going to install it on MY hardware but I am curious what happens when caution is thrown to the wind and it’s pedal to the metal.
I expect that some forks will actually have useful features or corrections that, when cherry picked, cleaned and polished, can improve the main kernel.
The rest (98% or more) (yes, I pulled that number from my arse) will be absolute rubbish.
I do not envy the kernel maintainer’s job at this point. They are sifting sand with a spade and a sieve while the world is dumping truckloads of rubble at them.