Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Time to call it quits for the maintainer summit?

On Tue, 11 Aug 2026 at 09:12, Geert Uytterhoeven <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Aug 2026 at 05:30, Dave Airlie <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > It's not even all of DRM, it's specifically the AMD and Intel driver
> > > stacks which as far as I can tell just routinely cherry pick all their
> > > fixes between their development and fixes branches without even
> > > considering the possibility of either merging up the fixes branch or
> > > just waiting and letting the fixes propagate back.  None of the rest of
> > > the DRM trees ever seems to cause these issues.
> >
> > AMD and Intel are just the two largest teams with the longest
> > pipelines of internal engineers and teams. There are between 50 and
> > 100 people in those groups, across multiple disjoint teams feeding
> > into a single driver. It just doesn't scale for all 50-100 people to
> > understand the cycle of the upstream Linus tree at all times for all
> > patches.
>
> Doesn't this cause internal (to AMD and Intel) issues, too?
> How come we cannot educate contributors at these two large companies,
> while we expect other contributors to be aware?
> I would hope the people who do the actual commits do know?
>
> > Which means for CI reasons and pipeline reasons, things go into -next
> > is the default, our -next trees are always open, and get disconnected
> > from upstream next from rc6->rc1 so not to mess things up.
>
> Just merging fixes into next[*], and resolving the conflicts, before
> publishing the latter would help a lot.  That would mean the conflicts
> would no longer impact every user of your next branch.

That wouldn't solve the issue for people who care about the actual
commit IDs and not having duplicates, e.g. for stable tacking, and
in Fixes-tags.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

-- 
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- [email protected]

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds