Since about a year we’re running the Intel graphics driver with a new process: Besides the two established maintainers we’ve added all regular contributors as committers to the main feature branch feeding into -next. This turned out into a tremendous success, but did require some initial adustments to how we run things in the first few months.

I’ve presented the new model here at Kernel Recipes in Paris, and I will also talk about it at Kernel Summit in Santa Fe. Since LWN is present at both I won’t bother with a full writeup, but leave that to much better editors. Update: LWN on kernel maintainer scalability.

Anyway, there’s a video recording and the slides. Our process is also documented - scroll down to the bottom for the more interesting bits around what’s expected of committers.

On a related note: At XDC, and a bit before, Emma Anholt started a discussion about improving our patch submission process, especially for new contributors. He used the Rust community as a great example, and presented about it at XDC. Rather interesting to hear his perspective as a first-time contributor confirm what I learned in LCA this year in Emily Dunham’s awesome talk on Life is better with Rust’s community automation.