Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Time to call it quits for the maintainer summit?

[Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@kernel.org>]

On 11/08/2026 05:29, Dave Airlie wrote:
>>>> If your assumption is correct, this is internal cat herding ... MM has
>>>> much the same problem except that it has to deal with somewhat
>>>> opinionated architecture maintainers (around 22 of them) to agree on
>>>> the internal abstractions for MM primitives.  Perhaps rather than
>>>> getting into my problem is bigger than yours type arguments, we could
>>>> observe that MM might run a bit more smoothly because it gets an
>>>> additional 3 day conference (LSF/MM) plus a MC at Plumbers to sort
>>>> itself out?
>>
>>> I guess the question is, what exactly is being big for DRM that it needs to do
>>> cherry-picking for their linux-next branch whereas Networking and ARM do
>>> not? Is DRM bigger than either of those? From what I understand VFS doesn't
>>> have to do that either. And VFS has a large range of file systems to deal
>>> with. But it also has one of the best abstraction layers of the kernel.
>>
>> It's not even all of DRM, it's specifically the AMD and Intel driver
>> stacks which as far as I can tell just routinely cherry pick all their
>> fixes between their development and fixes branches without even
>> considering the possibility of either merging up the fixes branch or
>> just waiting and letting the fixes propagate back.  None of the rest of
>> the DRM trees ever seems to cause these issues.
> 
> AMD and Intel are just the two largest teams with the longest
> pipelines of internal engineers and teams. There are between 50 and
> 100 people in those groups, across multiple disjoint teams feeding
> into a single driver. It just doesn't scale for all 50-100 people to
> understand the cycle of the upstream Linus tree at all times for all
> patches.

Qualcomm has also between 50-100 people in different teams upstreaming
to similar subsystems (like SoC) and they try to understand the cycle.

It's just AMD and Intel do not care to understand, because it is easier
for them and no one nags them...

Best regards,
Krzysztof