linux-next: changing maintainership

linux-next: changing maintainership

[Stephen Rothwell]

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Hi all,

Some of you already know this, but this is a general announcement.

I will be stepping down as Linux-Next maintainer on Jan 16, 2026.  Mark
Brown has generously volunteered to take up the challenge.  He has
helped in the past filling in when I have been unavailable, so
hopefully knows what he is getting in to.  I hope you will all treat
him with the same (or better) level of respect that I have received.

It has been a long but mostly interesting task and I hope it has been
helpful to others.  It seems a long time since I read Andrew Morton's
"I have a dream" email and decided that I could help out there - little
did I know what I was heading for.

I hope to still be around the kernel community, but just not so active.
-- 
Cheers,
Stephen Rothwell

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Re: linux-next: changing maintainership

[Mark Brown]

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On Thu, Dec 18, 2025 at 06:07:21PM +1100, Stephen Rothwell wrote:

> Some of you already know this, but this is a general announcement.

> I will be stepping down as Linux-Next maintainer on Jan 16, 2026.  Mark
> Brown has generously volunteered to take up the challenge.  He has
> helped in the past filling in when I have been unavailable, so
> hopefully knows what he is getting in to.  I hope you will all treat
> him with the same (or better) level of respect that I have received.

> It has been a long but mostly interesting task and I hope it has been
> helpful to others.  It seems a long time since I read Andrew Morton's
> "I have a dream" email and decided that I could help out there - little
> did I know what I was heading for.

> I hope to still be around the kernel community, but just not so active.

Thanks Stephen for all your work over the many years you've been doing
-next, these are certainly going to be big shoes to try to fill.

Thanks also to Arm for agreeing to support me doing this.

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Re: linux-next: changing maintainership

[Miguel Ojeda]

On Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:07:21 +1100 Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au> wrote:
>
> It has been a long but mostly interesting task and I hope it has been
> helpful to others.

Thanks Stephen for all these years and, personally, thanks for allowing
me to have the Rust branch there for more than a year before it got
initially merged. I think that helped a lot to convince people we were
not breaking things :)

Cheers,
Miguel

Re: linux-next: changing maintainership

[Krzysztof Kozlowski]

On 18/12/2025 08:07, Stephen Rothwell wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Some of you already know this, but this is a general announcement.
> 
> I will be stepping down as Linux-Next maintainer on Jan 16, 2026.  Mark
> Brown has generously volunteered to take up the challenge.  He has
> helped in the past filling in when I have been unavailable, so
> hopefully knows what he is getting in to.  I hope you will all treat
> him with the same (or better) level of respect that I have received.
> 
> It has been a long but mostly interesting task and I hope it has been
> helpful to others.  It seems a long time since I read Andrew Morton's
> "I have a dream" email and decided that I could help out there - little
> did I know what I was heading for.
> 


Thank you Stephen for amazing work you did for all these years. Not the
easiest work, also not the most glorious but one very important to the
community.

Good luck Mark and thanks for continuing with the linux-next!

Best regards,
Krzysztof

Re: linux-next: changing maintainership

[Stephen Rothwell]

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Hi all,

On Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:07:21 +1100 Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au> wrote:
>
> I will be stepping down as Linux-Next maintainer on Jan 16, 2026.  Mark
> Brown has generously volunteered to take up the challenge.  He has
> helped in the past filling in when I have been unavailable, so
> hopefully knows what he is getting in to.  I hope you will all treat
> him with the same (or better) level of respect that I have received.

Due to logistics with leaving IBM, my last linux-next release will be
Thursday, Jan 15 (i.e. I won't have time to do a release on Friday).
Mark should take up the mantle sometime after that.

-- 
Cheers,
Stephen Rothwell

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