Re: Policy regarding linux-next only changes

Mark Brown <[email protected]> Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:49:44 +0100

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

On Sat, Jul 25, 2026 at 12:44:17PM +0900, Tetsuo Handa wrote:

> Excuse me, but what does "successfully unit tested" mean? Broken patches
> that do not build, or trigger oops by just "/bin/cat" _are_ arriving at
> linux-next tree, which in turn preventing continuous testing by syzbot.

You're supposed to make some reasonable effort to ensure that things
work, if you break things badly enough and pay little enough attention
your tree will get kicked.  To even get merged in -next on a given day a
tree has to build in some of the more common configurations, and not
break KUnit.  It's not expected that everything will be perfect, people
can't be reasonably expected to to test all possible configurations - a
big part of the point of -next is to pool coverage - but it's expected
that people will be making a reasonable effort.

> I am OK to post my debug patches to the relevant mailing list. But without
> responses from developers / maintainers, my debug patches won't be able to
> find a route to linux-next, which in turn prevents us from debugging.

The other side of this is that the reason people are noticing that you
have added these patches is that you are causing breakage and disruption
for them that catches them by surprise, a lot of what's coming through
here is that you need to work actively with other people.

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