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Source: Open Source China
www.oschina.net/news/116890/linux-kernel-maintainers-are-hard-to-find
Recently, a discussion between Linus Torvalds and VMware’s Chief Open Source Officer Dirk Hohndel about the future of Linux kernel maintenance has attracted attention in the tech community. Linus believes that after the current generation of Linux kernel maintainers ages, it will be difficult to find successors, as many young developers find the “Linux kernel project not that interesting.”
Kernel Development Feels Boring to Young People
In his conversation with Dirk, Linus stated that Linux kernel development is boring for most people. “I have said that the kernel is boring, but what I mean is that in a sense, many new technologies should be more interesting than kernel development. However, for me and other kernel developers, nothing is more interesting than kernel development, which interacts with the underlying hardware, as it truly controls everything that happens in a computer. So the kernel is not boring for me, but I think most people would find it boring.”
The conversation quickly turned to a troubling question: since fewer and fewer people are interested in kernel development, what will happen to the community when the current generation of Linux kernel maintainers ages?
Currently, the Linux kernel maintainers are mainly Linus, who is about to turn 51, and some older programmers from the 50s and 60s. “At some point, the Linux community needs to start considering succession changes; what should we do then?” Dirk asked.
Linus himself is quite optimistic about this, believing that the entire Linux kernel community is not that old yet. “Many newcomers are under 50, and they are usually the ones doing real work (contributing code to the project). Those of us who have been in the community for nearly thirty years, like me and some early project participants, have focused our main energy on project maintenance and management.”
Finding Maintainers is Difficult
“We do have a lot of people writing code, but we lack maintainers.” In Linus’s view, the difficulty in the future transition of the Linux kernel project lies in finding a successor. “It turns out that it is very hard to find qualified new maintainers. To become a kernel maintainer, you must be constantly present, which means you have to read emails from around the world every day and respond to them, just like I have done for the past 30 years, without interruption. It is now very difficult to find someone who can look at others’ code and strictly review every submission upstream to determine whether they can be merged into our main codebase. This is our main problem,” Linus said.
Another issue is that maintainers must spend a long time earning the trust of the entire community. Linus said, “This is not only the trust of other maintainers but also the trust of all code contributors… This takes time. Thirty years ago, when we started this project, we actually didn’t need much trust. As long as you showed up in the community, you could participate, and we would work together to make this thing better. But now, many people rely on the Linux kernel; you can’t do crazy things like we used to.”
“I Don’t Want to Be Yelled at by Linus”
As a significant open-source project worldwide, the Linux kernel project is facing an aging developer base and difficulty in finding maintainers. In response to this discussion, some foreign developers have expressed their views on forums. Many believe that this situation is partly attributed to Linus’s communication attitude with the outside world.
“Finding maintainers is difficult? Is this a serious question? I don’t think anyone wants to receive a response like this – ‘Is this a bug? How long have you been a kernel maintainer? Haven’t you learned the first rule of kernel maintenance? I don’t want to receive such obvious garbage, idiotic submissions…’ – Seeing such a response really shocked me,” a netizen quoted a previous reply from Linus in the mailing list, pointing out that Linus’s poor attitude in interpersonal communication is a key factor that deters many from this work.
Commenters believe that in a normal working relationship, support from superiors to employees is often more beneficial to project progress than blame. “I acknowledge all of Linus’s achievements to date, but if someone communicated with my team in the manner described above, I would definitely correct that person’s attitude before starting work. Although Linus has a brain smarter than most bosses, his attitude is as bad as those lousy bosses.” Moreover, Linus is not anyone’s boss; no one wants to be publicly scolded by someone they have never met.
Some rational developers stated that although Linus’s words are “clumsy,” it is undeniable that doing this job is really difficult. This developer believes that the current problem with the Linux kernel project is that the learning curve is too steep, and there is a lack of smooth learning materials. “While I agree that most people may be afraid of being rejected by Linus like garbage, this doesn’t matter for some of us with thicker skin. As an older technical person, I can understand where Linus’s anger comes from; he needs to protect thousands of Linux users; I can also understand why younger technical personnel may see it as pure aggression. I enjoy being able to develop at the kernel level, but the relevant learning resources are scarce and often difficult to understand. I have been coding in various languages for over 20 years, but I still don’t know where to start to make a useful contribution to the Linux kernel project.”
Documentation Alone is Not Enough
Establishing comprehensive learning documentation and examples from simple to complex is essential for attracting new talent to a project, and the Linux kernel project is no exception. However, given the current scale of the Linux kernel project, creating perfect documentation will be a very challenging task. A retired developer believes that the difficulty of getting started with the current Linux kernel project has increased exponentially compared to decades ago. “When I retired, I left detailed documentation and example pseudocode for my project, and I estimate that this code, documentation, and example pseudocode would take the development team eight months to fully take over the project. Clearly, the workload brought by the documentation and example code of the Linux kernel will far exceed this number. When I started programming, I could understand the entire process with minimal documentation while working on machine code programs on a 16-bit microprocessor consuming less than 2kW. But now, considering extremely complex processing in programs using C language, along with various references and interactions with other things, I don’t even know where to start thinking. For a new developer, mastering the entire Linux kernel is a huge and difficult process.”
In other words, to attract more young developers to join, the Linux kernel project needs to address issues beyond just documentation; an organizational structure that manages everything is essential. “The question must be whether Linus has created a self-sustaining and mature system to integrate everything together.” Comprehensive tutorial materials, recruitment of young talent, etc., will require individuals in the community with excellent organizational and interpersonal skills to achieve, rather than relying solely on code to solve the problem.
It is hard to imagine where Linux will go when Linus and this generation of programmers are gone.
– EOF –
Recommended Reading Click the title to jump
1. Linus Torvalds: The Linux Kernel, Community Diversity, and the Future of Developers
2. Is the term ‘master’ in Git sensitive to black friends? Netizens: Waiting for Linus to explode
3. Linus unaffected by the pandemic, releases Linux 5.6
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