Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Maintainer burnout

Daniel Vetter
2023-08-21T08:50:17Z

On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 at 19:07, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 at 17:10, Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> > I was wondering last time if we can do a run of short sessions
> > where a few volunteers talk about their subsystems? Let's say
> > 10min talking about
> > - current process subsystem uses
> > - "realities" / day to day challenges / problems
> > - how the subsystem is evolving the process
>
> I feel like we did exactly that a few years in a row, but it was
> probably back before covid times, and probably when it was still
> called the "kernel summit" rather than "maintainer summit".
>
> At that point it was mainly just the GPU and ARM people who were doing it.
>
> [ Goes back and looks at my old ksummit mails ]
>
> Heh. It seems we did it enough that during the 2018 discussion, we had
> Daniel Vetter say "We don't need another overview over group
> maintainership". I think most of this was 2016/17 or so, and then by
> 2018 we had that "not again.." situation.
>
> But I suspect that all predates the networking people starting to do
> the group maintainership (I think you started doing pull requests in
> 2020?), so I guess you never saw any of that.
>
> I do think the whole "how to spread the pain of being a maintainer" is
> very much the point of the maintainer summit, though, so I do think we
> should revisit.

I think hearing what the networking folks do would be rather
interesting, maybe in a split format with a presentation for the
entire lpc audience and then maintainer summit discussion with the
small group. There's a lot more maintainers and area leaders than the
30 or so who can participate in the maintainer summit.

For gpu not much really has changed in the process and approach, it
seems to hold up the test of time. The one thing that's been under
progress and might finally land is some CI integration with our
gitlab.freedesktop.org infrastructure. We have that for years for the
userspace side (including hw testing) and some kernel drivers, but not
yet for the entire gpu subsystem. Which is pain because it results in
a lot of duplicated work and stuff falling through cracks for no good
reasons. I'm hoping that this merge window will finally have the pull
with the initial thing (all contained in a dedicated directory so it's
easy to delete in case it all turns out to be a big mistake).

So there's really nothing to report from the GPU side, and I think my
quote from 2018 still holds :-)

Cheers, Daniel
--
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation