Workstation product kernel requirements

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 5:39 AM, Bastien Nocera <bnocera at redhat.com> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Bastien Nocera <bnocera at redhat.com> wrote:
>> > ----- Original Message -----
> <snip>
>> > That's a first pass, and more than enough to keep the kernel guys busy for
>> > a little while :)
>>
>> OK, so those are all good things (well, maybe not all of them..), but
>> they're definitely more upstream issues.  Not everyone is aware of
>> this, but "Fedora kernel maintainer" usually doesn't translate to
>> "work on upstream kernel features".  In fact, days where I get to
>> write a patch for _anything_ are happy days.  Most of our time is
>> spent on bug fixing, triage, testing, etc.
>>
>> As I said above though, it's good for us to be aware of these things.
>> We can keep an eye on them, and talk to the relevant upstreams as they
>> get developed.  I just don't want anyone to get the impression that
>> we're going to solve anything rapidly.
>
> Seems a great shame that we (Fedora) don't have the same kind of influence
> on upstream for the kernel as we (the desktop guys) have on GNOME or some
> lower-level plumbing parts.

We do have influence to a degree, but it's in areas other than new
feature/code development.  Dave is doing awesome things with Trinity
and Coverity.  Justin is working really hard on automated testing and
QA.  Though yes, we'd really like to start doing more upstream work.

> It seems to me that it would be great if people with a better knowledge of
> those areas in the kernel could drive the development of the features we
> need for the workstation product. A number of people on the desktop team
> already contribute to the kernel, but we don't really have people who can
> drive contributions from, say, the VFS, filesystems or merging currently
> unmergeable features (a number of Android kernel patches would be
> useful to us, as seen in my original mail) in the kernel.
>
> Keep up the good work handling our downstream bugs and consider this a mandate
> to ask for more headcount :)

Not a bad idea.  I have a new manager now.  I'll see if I can
sucker^Wconvince him we have a need ;)

josh