How to recruit more kernel maintainers

By Jonathan Corbet
September 27, 2021

The kernel development process depends on its subsystem maintainers, who are often overworked and, as a result, grumpy. At the 2021 Kernel Maintainers Summit, Ted Ts'o brought up the topic of maintainer recruitment and retention, but failed to elicit a lot of new ideas from the assembled group.

Making life easier for developers — the topic of the previous session — is important, but perhaps one of the best ways to do that would be to bring in more maintainers. How, Ts'o asked, can we do that? The community should also be thinking about the problems of succession, given our maintainers are not getting any younger. Dave Airlie responded that the real question should be: how do we encourage companies to pay for maintainers? Companies will pay developers, but they are far less interested in supporting the maintainer role.

Linus Torvalds said that he fully agreed with that sentiment. He has been talking with companies and telling them that they need to encourage their developers to take on more roles, and to work into the maintainer role in particular. There should be, he said, one maintainer in a company for every ten developers, but companies are nowhere near that ratio. Thomas Gleixner said that one way to help in that regard would be for companies to give their developers time to work on their own projects.

Greg Kroah-Hartman said that the only way for developers to be able to work as maintainers within companies is for it to be a part of their job — something they will be evaluated on at the end of the year. This has to come from the top down, he said. Airlie answered, though, that maintainership can come from the bottom up as well; the DRM subsystem has a group review structure that requires developers to help review code. When the need arises, that makes it easy to pull developers up into maintainer roles. Chris Mason said that, at Facebook, maintainership is in the job description, and the company has had good success with that.

Ts'o concluded the session by suggesting that this might be a topic for the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board to consider; perhaps the board could draw up a set of recommendations for companies.

Index entries for this article
Conference	Kernel Maintainers Summit/2021

How to recruit more kernel maintainers

Posted Sep 28, 2021 19:24 UTC (Tue) by olof (subscriber, #11729) [Link] (1 responses)

Linaro was started for several purposes, but one was to extract out the upstream-focused employees of the member companies and giving them the freedom needed to work on actually doing the upstream work. If this hadn't happened, the enormous cleanup of ARM SoC platforms would likely never have happened at the speed it did, and probably still been ongoing.

However, the model degraded over time, and is no longer really the case (they employ a few maintainers, but most of the focus is no longer on pure upstream work). So it's not a (proven) long-term solution in this area.

How to recruit more kernel maintainers

Posted Sep 30, 2021 4:42 UTC (Thu) by mjpoirier (subscriber, #63852) [Link]

I am not sure what you are referring to when talking about the "model degrading over time"... Linaro employs 66 maintainers that looks after a total of 40 open source projects, a number that has rarely been this high in the history of the company. Activities in kernel subsystems have diminished over the last few years because, as you pointed out, there has been a massive cleanup in the ARM SoC platforms and there is simply less work to do. The commitment to maintaining kernel subsystem has not changed and people are now looking at other areas where their contributions can provide benefits.