Maintaining a Linux Kernel for 13 Years? You Must be Kidding Me. We Need at Least 30?
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 25/10/2017

Maintaining a Linux Kernel for 13 Years? You Must be Kidding Me. We Need at Least 30? - Agustin Benito Bethencourt & Ben Hutchings, Codethink Ltd

Industrial grade solutions has a life expectancy of 30+ years. Maintaining a Linux kernel for such a long time in the open has not been done. Many claim that is not sustainable but corporations that build power plants, railway systems, etc. are willing to tackle this challenge. This talk will describe the work done so far on the kernel maintenance and testing front at the CIP initiative.

During the talk it will be explained how we decide which parts of the kernel to cover - reducing the amount of work to be done and the risk of being unable to maintain the claimed support. The process of reviewing and backporting fixes that might be needed on an older branch will be briefly described. CIP is taking a different approach from many other projects when it comes to testing the kernel. The talk will go over it as well as the coming steps. and the future steps.

About Agustin Benito Bethencourt
Bachelor degree in Applied Physics and Master in Training. Agustin Benito Bethencourt has experience as entrepreneur, executive, IT director, product owner and consultant, in the FLOSS space. Currently he is Principal Consultant at Codethink Ltd currently focused in collaborative environments like CIP, AGL or GENIVI. Agustin has extensive experience working in the open in Open Source communities like KDE or openSUSE. Full background available at http://www.toscalix.com

About Ben Hutchings
Ben Hutchings is a developer at Codethink Ltd. He is a reputed kernel hacker and Debian developer. He currently maintains Linux Kernel 3.16 and 3.2 (Debian kernels) and the CIP kernel, based on 4.4 LTS.