[MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Any feedback for -next?

Mark Brown <[email protected]> Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:54:59 +0100

Newsgroups	dev.linux.lists.ksummit,org.kernel.vger.linux-next
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hi,

I was reminded by some of the maintainers summit threads that it would
be a good idea to check in about how things are going with -next and if
anyone has any ideas for things that could be done better. I've flagged
this as a maintainers summit topic just in case but I think it's quite
probably more of a list thing.

Mostly it's been business as usual, hopefully I'll get better at doing
merges as time goes on. That said the list of visible changes I wrote
seems a bit long:

- We in theory now do rust builds (at least when all*config enable it,
hopefully that get fixed soon[1]), given that rust things need merge
fixups and rust is now a normal feature this seems obviously useful.

- We now do KUnit runs as part of the builds with KASAN enabled, this
has been quite useful for keeping memory corruption and severe boot
break issues out of -next I think. Prior to enabling KASAN it would
often flag on a different tree to the one that was causing issues
which wasn't so useful but KASAN seems to have done the trick there.

- We now cover a subset of the kselftests, this does find issues
moderately often and helps keep CI coverage.

- Started sending out a weekly summary of the state of the world -
perhaps there's extra stuff I could be adding in there?

- Removed one tree that was causing issues and came very close to
removing another, that one fixed the problems promptly. I'm not sure
if I'm actually being more pushy here (as was requested), that's
about all the issues that came to my attention.

- We now do allnoconfig builds on the incremental builds, this does
occasionally catch things that are allnoconfig specific which I did
get some reasonable grumbling about but I think the majority of
issues are things that would show up with any other build so the
failing fast is very useful.

- Swapped around a bunch of the targets from PowerPC to arm64.

- I live in Europe not Austraila which has messed with some people's
schedules.

Things that I'm aware of that have been suggested but didn't happen, or
where I'm aware of issues:

- Covering the documentation builds, I don't think I've ever seen them
building cleanly when I've looked and IIRC there were some issues
with not getting error codes on failure too. I do intermittently
build as part of the final build.

- Standard reporting of duplicate commits (the tooling does notice, but
it's a manual job to actually tell anyone about it which mostly only
happens if I notice them causing a conflict).

- Pushing out mails more promptly, there's a manual step where things
get dropped into my postponed folder and I don't always actually send
as fast as I should (the "tree for today" mails ending up getting
sent the next day is the worst for this).

Any other ideas?

Thanks to Thierry and Breno for helping out with holiday cover. There's
also a bunch of stuff changed with the scripting which they're also
helping with but isn't really visible if you're not actually running
-next.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260805-rust-reverse-randstruct-dep-v3-1-7b8b2c761d6e@kernel.org

Thanks,
Mark

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