I think many kernel developers - including myself, a long time ago - believe that becoming a Linux kernel maintainer is a difficult process. As if some secret group has to choose you, you need to prove yourself, and then a Masonic lodge will select the best candidates from a huge pool of competition.

That's simply not true. Becoming a Linux kernel maintainer is actually quite easy.

The difficulty lies in staying one.

Every now and then, I notice subsystems that need more maintainers. Do you want to be one?

Of course taking maintainership position and being a true maintainer are a bit different things, but I hope you get the point...

Today's misinformation provided by Google Search's "AI Overview" (which cannot be disabled, apparently):
"All EU member states are parties to the Rome Statute, except for Turkey."

(I am not complaining that the AI missed today's withdrawal of Hungary)

2024 was a record-breaking year for forest fires in Ukraine.

This is another devastating consequence of Russia’s illegal invasion.

Nearly one million hectares were burnt in the country – more than twice the area burned in the EU in the same period.

The EU is committed to helping Ukrainians strengthen their rescue and fire services by providing them with machinery and protective equipment.

With Ukraine – and its brave firefighters – unflinchingly.

ℹ️ https://europa.eu/!fxW7MD

#EU

I sent a simple, yet not the shortest, DT bindings patch for the Linux kernel. I got five review tags in response, for which I thank you, however three (60%) of them where in format:

> My commit msg...
> Signed-off-by: Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzysztof.kozlowski@linaro.org>

Reviewed-by: Mr. Foo

> here goes
> my ...
> entire patch
> for su knows how long.
> Really long!

I was complaining about this on the lists already. I am not going to, heh, no one should be to, scroll through entire message to check whether there was something after that Reviewed-by tag. Or after comment.

Knowing that it is trivial to remove unneeded context (see below), I find that just disrespectful to me and my time.

I am going to ignore EVERYTHING from something which looks like end of message. if you put there something, your problem.

E.g. if one uses mutt and vim - that's part of your alias:
```
nmap <silent> <leader>A :.,$d<CR>A<CR><CR>Acked-by: Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@kernel.org><CR><CR>Best regards,<CR>Krzysztof<CR><ESC>
```

ZTE or zte.com.cn apparently decided to flood kernel with extremely poor quality, automated patches. Reminds me previous flood from Vivo.com. Some of the patches were never built and clearly do not compile. Some are looking correct, but are wrong if you open the context of the file (e.g. using sysfs_emit in procfs or some other code). None of the review feedbacks were responded to, they just keep sending the code, sometimes 5 same patches without noticeable changes or without changelog.

And I bet somewhere within this flood of automation-generated stuff, is actual fix or actual bug pretending to be a fix but introducing a vulnerability.

When Trump says that he can apply economic pressure on Putin, he's lying. He has very few levers that haven't already been pushed. Using his own analogy, Trump acts like he has an ace up his sleeve, but he only has a pair of jokers. The only sure way to apply pressure on Putin is to give Ukraine all they need to win on the battlefield.

If #Ukraine really did attack #Twitter, | think the only logical thing is for #Elon to sign a cease fire immediately, give them half of Twitter and make sure he says thank you.

Good morning to readers; #Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.

#Ukraine helped the U.S. in its invasion of Iraq, losing 18 of its own men.

But when #Kyiv needed help, the U.S. leveraged Ukraine's weakness.

Serhii, who served in Iraq, knows the risks of allying with the U.S.

PSA: please don't use git.kernel.org directly for your CI needs. It is not viable for us to provide enough capacity to withstand dozens of CI nodes all trying to clone linux.git at the same time for multiple CI farms. You *will* get ip-blocked. Please set up a local mirror and hit that instead.

I made a developer meme
cc @Codeberg
#ipv6

Not only new Linux kernel releases count! Look at LWN summary of v4.19-stable life and how many fixes that kernel received:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1000933/

Appearing on top-bugfix contributors list for v4.19.x series is a pleasant reminder that my contributions might actually help some real users on real products.

If you've ever wondered what it is like to throw up and have diarrhea simultaneously, JIRA now has an AI button.

Anyone has cool Arm topics to share? The Call For Papers for Linaro Connect conference in Lisbon is still open (till 13th Feb)!
https://www.linaro.org/connect/call-for-proposals

The Connect will be in May:
https://www.linaro.org/connect/

I’ve told LF repeatedly that “education” as the leading point is insulting. Many maintainers know exactly what they need to do, but they lack time and energy for it. Lecturing them, I mean “giving them skills”, is… not actually a solution.

But it allows LF (and friends like GH) to continue elephant-in-the-room-ing the actual solution, which is paying maintainers for the trillions of dollars of value they create.

https://fosstodon.org/@donmccurdy/113512775802077660

I've been expecting something like this since the XZ hack, but still ... frustrated/annoyed/sad to see Microsoft and 13 (!) partners jointly announcing that their answer is to “educate” open source maintainers.

It's nice that they're compensating maintainers for the time spent on that training, but ... compliance with corporate security policies is still a whole lot of ongoing, unpaid work after that? Sigh.

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/announcing-github-secure-open-source-fund/

Last year, for each of six Linux kernel releases - v6.7, v6.8 ... v6.12 - I was topping the list of most active contributors. This consistency led to a more interesting stat: I am one of the most active Linux kernel contributors for this period (and I don't count Kent here as he just dropped stuff out of tree... and then developed things to his own tree without review or mailing list collaboration) with 1339 commits upstream.

I am however more proud of another impact I made: I am one of the most active reviewers of the last one year of Linux kernel development. Reviewing takes a lot of time, a lot of iterations, a lot of patience, a lot of template answers and results with only "some" of reviewed-by credit going to Linux kernel git history. Yet here I am: ~1000 reviewed-by credits for last year v6.7 - v6.12 Linux kernel.

Source, LWN.net:
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/997959/377cf2f076306247/

1000 days since the Russian army invaded Ukraine, destroying its cities and murdering civilians, all because Putin needed a "quick victorious war" to remain in power.

I will never forget, and I will never forgive.

TIL: @tuxedocomputers released #Linux #kernel drivers for their machines under the #GPLv3, which makes it impossible for competitors and distros to ship them pre-compiled, as that license is incompatible with the #LinuxKernel's #GPLv2 only license.

They did this purposely, allegedly to "keep control of the upstream pacing" – and want to re-license the code while upstreaming.

https://github.com/tuxedocomputers/tuxedo-keyboard/issues/61

https://gitlab.com/tuxedocomputers/development/packages/tuxedo-drivers/-/issues/137

https://gitlab.com/tuxedocomputers/development/packages/tuxedo-drivers#regarding-upstreaming-of-tuxedo-drivers

https://gitlab.com/tuxedocomputers/development/packages/tuxedo-drivers#regarding-upstreaming-of-tuxedo-drivers

@ptesarik Countries are political concepts, so every country where you move the organization will impose some sort of politics on that organization. Unless you propose moving to Principality of Sealand? :)
Joking aside, Linux Foundation is nowadays business with very big business behind, so change of residency might not change much.

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@ptesarik/113355467229724671