Following the two Kernel Logs last week (1,2) which summarised the salient information from the LWN.net Kernel Summit 2008 reports available only to subscribers, the LWN.net articles are now available to anyone who wants to know exactly what went on. Other sources of information from the conference, which was open only to invited kernel developers, are still hard to come by.

On the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), initial results of the developer conference are evident. Kernel hackers decided to integrate the Linux-staging development branch more fully into the main development branch. Greg Kroah-Hartman took the first steps in this direction with his patch series sent as an RFC to the LKML.

This means that drivers that are not ready to be merged into the Kernel, which until now have been stored in a separately administered staging branch, will be moved to the main development branch in a drivers/staging/ folder. This is intended both to help the kernel developers to keep a better eye on the drivers, and to motivate the hackers to improve them. The kernel will flag such drivers with a TAINT_CRAP flag so that developers will not spend time investigating error messages from systems in which one these sub-par drivers were active.

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