Three Decades in Kernelland
Talkat Open Source Summit Japan + AI_dev: Open Source GenAI & ML Summit + Automotive Linux Summit 2025 · 2025-12-08..12-10·
summary
Timeline of Linux development from ~10,000 to ~40 million lines of code and a steady, monotonic growth; claims that resilience comes from licensing (GPL) and an upstream‑first model that kept contributions together; specific tool history: adoption of BitKeeper then git created in a weekend after BitKeeper’s license withdrawal; process changes from even/odd releases to a two‑week merge window + 8‑week stabilization cycle; examples: 20‑year PREEMPT_RT journey, kernel.org breakin, and measurable scaling to ~5,000 developers and ~80,000 commits per year.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (20)
- 0:00Three decades intro
- 3:09From hobby to innovation
- 6:56Development and licensing
- 9:23Modularity and diversity
- 10:49From joke to corporate
- 13:59Dot-com bubble survival
- 15:21In-person kernel summits
- 16:04Scaling kernel challenges
- 18:11BitKeeper adoption
- 20:16SCO lawsuit lessons
- 23:08Git’s birth
- 24:34Proprietary tools instability
- 25:39Even-odd release flaws
- 27:26Rapid stable releases
- 29:13Long-term support
- 30:37Upstream-first policy
- 31:18Hardware support struggles
- 33:03Kernel.org security
- 33:47Modern challenges
- 36:17Q&A
related talks
44mThree Decades in Kernelland
41mThree Decades in Kernelland
25mA Conversation with Linus Torvalds
21mKeynote: Linus Torvalds, Creator of Linux & Git, in conversation with Dirk Hohndel, VMware
44mLinux Weather Forecast
25mOpening Keynote
41mStatus of Embedded Linux
25mGetting Into Linux Kernel Development After 30 Years