Re: Policy regarding linux-next only changes

[Theodore Tso]

On Sat, Jul 25, 2026 at 02:20:29PM -0500, Tetsuo Handa wrote:
> Not all developers have enough money to pay to companies/organizations.
> Some developers (including me) are contributing by spending their time
> instead of paying money.
> 
> Your statements sound like "Poor men/women cannot participate into
> the Linux kernel development." Please don't assume that everything
> is controlled by "who pays the money?".

If they want to spend their own personal time, that's fine.  I just
don't want companies or hobbists spending *my* personal time.

> Please respond to syzbot-related patches.

Oh, I, or some other ext4 developer do respond --- if it's a bug fix.
I wish more of the contributors would actually pay attention to the
Sashiko reviews, and actually *test* the patches using "kvm-xfstests
smoke" which takes 20 minutes, but we'll respond, one way or another.

We might NACK the patch if it destroys performance because it adds
tests in a hot path and it's addressing a really pointless syzbot scenario
which requires root privilegs to modify the loop device while the file
system is mounted, however.

However, if it's a debugging patch to fix what we might consider a
rather pointless syzbot bug (and there are an awful lot of those, at
least for ext4) it might take a while for me to respond.  And if it's
about landing ext4 patches from a non-ext4 tree, abusing the
linux-next tree, that's a somewhat different matter....

	   	      	       			  - Ted