Zack’s Kernel News

The Kernel Development Process

An interesting debate recently shed some light on the kernel development process. Greg Kroah-Hartman started up the stable review cycle for the 3.3.2 kernel. The idea of the review cycle is to incorporate patches into the tree and give people a chance to test them before the 3.3.2 kernel is actually released. The goal is to get Linus Torvalds’s 3.x releases as stable as possible while Linus and the rest of the developers continue preparing the next 3.x release. In theory, the 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.3.3, …, 3.3.y kernels will each be more stable and reliable than the one before.