Kernel space: Time to slow down?

There is, in fact, a wealth of development kernels to test, and it is not always clear where users and developers should be concentrating their testing effort. A consensus may be forming, though, that more people should be looking at the linux-next tree in particular. Linux-next is where all of the patches intended for the next merge window are supposed to congregate; the current contents of linux-next, as of this writing, are targeted toward 2.6.27. This is the place where early integration issues and other problems should be found; if linux-next is well tested, the number of problems showing up in the next merge window should be somewhat reduced.

The linux-next tree is an interesting experiment. It is, for all practical purposes, making the development cycle longer: since linux-next exists, the 2.6.27 cycle has, in some sense, already started. Linux-next also does something which kernel developers have tended to resist: causing the stabilization period for one development cycle to overlap with active development for the next cycle. In the past, it has been argued that this kind of overlap will cause developers to prioritize the creation of new toys over fixing the problems with last week's toys.

Some people argue that this is happening now: developers are not spending enough time dealing with bugs - and that their carelessness is creating too many bugs in the first place. Others assert that, while it will never be possible to fix every reported bug, the bugs that really matter are being addressed. A real resolution to this disagreement seems unlikely; the creation of meaningful metrics on kernel quality is a difficult task. About the best that can be done is to try to keep the regression list as small as possible; as long as systems which once worked continue to work, it is hard to argue too forcefully that things are headed in the wrong direction.