Zack's Kernel News

Zack's Kernel News

Article from Issue 290/2025
Author(s):

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the bcachefs patch submission process.

The bcachefs Patch Submission Process

I recently wrote about a conflict between Kent Overstreet and Linus Torvalds in which Linus objected to Kent submitting large patches for his bcachefs filesystem after the merge window had closed. In the end, I concluded that Linus could go either way – either refusing to accept patches from Kent until Kent started following the normal policies for developers, or continuing to debate Kent so long as it seemed Kent was suffering from a legitimate misunderstanding. My sense was that "Linus generally prefers to win an argument rather than enforce his position."

So I had no major prediction to make. The story continued to play out when Kent posted another large patch for bcachefs, to which Linus replied:

"I'm getting really fed up here Kent.

[...]

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