Re: Policy regarding linux-next only changes

[Miguel Ojeda]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2026 at 4:35 PM Tetsuo Handa
<penguin-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Those who hate my attempts (i.e. sending patches to linux-next without
> being reviewed/acked by maintainers) are expecting that any patch is
> reviewed/acked by maintainers. But some maintainers are considering bugs

It is not "hate", it is just the linux-next rules:

    "
      * submitted under GPL v2 (or later) and include the Contributor's
         Signed-off-by,
      * posted to the relevant mailing list,
      * reviewed by you (or another maintainer of your subsystem tree),
      * successfully unit tested, and
      * destined for the current or next Linux merge window.
    "

That is why nobody is expecting random patches to appear there --
because every maintainer receives those rules when they add their tree
to linux-next.

And those rules make sense -- adding patches that are not ready or
unexpected can confuse others, break the build, add conflicts or,
worse of all, silently invalidate testing of normal patches going to
Linus.

Now, again, exceptions are definitely possible (e.g. I asked for one
to add Rust many months before it was finally merged), but one needs
to be quite careful and for something treewide like what you are
asking, it will always be tricky...

E.g. even if you always managed to perfectly place the changes behind
a `CONFIG_`, subsystems should probably still be warned, and Mark
would probably need to drop your side if there are conflicts to be
safe unless you coordinated the resolution beforehand with the
maintainers etc.

Cheers,
Miguel