The state of the memory-management development process, 2025 edition

Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer for the kernel's memory-management subsystem, tends to be quiet during the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, preferring to let the developers work things out on their own. That changes, though, when he leads the traditional development-process session in the memory-management track. At the 2025 gathering, this discussion covered a number of ways in which the process could be improved, but did not unearth any significant problems.
内核内存管理子系统的主要维护者 Andrew Morton 通常在 Linux 存储、文件系统、内存管理和 BPF 峰会期间保持低调，更倾向于让开发者自行解决问题。但在他主持内存管理议题中传统的开发流程环节时情况就不同了。在 2025 年的峰会中，这场讨论涵盖了多种可能改进流程的方式，但并未发现什么重大问题。

Morton started with the "usual whinges", primarily that many memory-management changes take too long to finalize. He accepted responsibility for much of that problem, saying that he needs to send more emails to move things along.
Morton 以“常见抱怨”开场，主要是许多内存管理相关的变更需要太长时间才能敲定。他为这个问题承担了大部分责任，表示自己需要发送更多邮件来推动事情进展。

He has heard complaints that he is overly eager to merge things, with the result that buggy code is fed into linux-next. Since memory-management bugs affect everybody, those complaints can come from far outside this subsystem. He has responded by being slower in accepting changes from submitters if he does not know them well, sending them a private note saying that he is waiting for reviews. But some unready code is still getting through, he said; he will se