There’s been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list… Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.
On Friday a set of fixes were submitted for merging into the current Linux 6.11 cycle. There were little fixes plus two big “fixes” around an rhashtable conversion and a new data structure for managing free lists in the BTree key cache. That later one eliminates the BTree key cache lock and avoids some locking contention that can appear in some multi-threaded workloads.
But this “fixes” pull request touches more than one thousand lines of code and we’re now more than half-way through the Linux 6.11 cycle. This is far from the first time that big “fixes” pulls for Bcachefs have been submitted post merge window and not the first time that it’s not strictly bug fixes but also heavier more feature-like additions being made via fixes pull requests. Linus Torvalds had enough and responded to the pull request.
It does represent freedom.
Kent can fork the kernel if he wants with all the fixes he wants in it and distribute it as he sees fit. This particular instance of the kernel (which happens to be original – the upstream), Linus has to balance allowing some fixes other developers want to include versus a ‘minor’ release of the kernel during this cycle (because it is a minor version release, not a major one). Kent could then also stop other developers from contributing to his fork but then those people could just fork his kernel fork and do what they want.
You as a user are free to use any of them. You’re even free to take Kent’s PRs right now with everything done in the kernel at this point, compile it and run it yourself if you want. You could even market it as something and sell it all if you want for a profit if you can get the customers. You’re free to do all of that. You can do it right now if you want.
Linus is the head of Linux because he’s trustworthy and acts responsibly (esp more so nowadays than previously)
If at any point he were to act in a way that tarnishes the trust built behind Linux, I wouldn’t be surprised if fellow maintainers forked Linux just like Redis and decided to put their weight behind the new project
Same like me or any of the mods or admins here; I would hope my ass gets banned faster than the speed of light if I were to ever act irresponsibly with mod/admin powers
“Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.” - Uncle Ben
