Workstation product kernel requirements

[Bastien Nocera]

----- 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.

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 :)

Cheers