kernel/linux.git/Documentation/process, branch v6.19.11

Documentation: Project continuity

2026-01-25T00:16:47+00:00

Document project continuity procedures. This is a plan for a plan for navigating events that affect the forward progress of the canonical Linux repository, torvalds/linux.git. It is a follow-up from Maintainer Summit [1]. Co-developed-by: Jonathan Corbet Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman Reviewed-by: Miguel Ojeda Reviewed-by: Kees Cook Reviewed-by: Jiri Kosina Reviewed-by: Steven Rostedt Link: https://lwn.net/Articles/1050179/ [1] Signed-off-by: Dan Williams Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

docs: netdev: refine 15-patch limit

2026-01-17T23:59:25+00:00

The 15 patch limit is intended by the maintainers to cover all outstanding patches on the mailing list on a per-tree basis. Not just those in a single patchset. Document this practice accordingly. Signed-off-by: Simon Horman Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260115-15-minutes-of-fame-v2-1-70cbf0883aff@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski

Documentation/process: maintainer-soc: Mark 'make' as commands

2026-01-07T16:47:43+00:00

Improve readability of the docs by marking 'make dtbs/dtbs_check' as shell commands. Signed-off-by: Krzysztof Kozlowski Reviewed-by: Linus Walleij Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20251223142726.73417-4-krzysztof.kozlowski@oss.qualcomm.com Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann

Documentation/process: maintainer-soc: Be more explicit about defconfig

2026-01-07T16:47:43+00:00

It is already documented but people still send noticeable amount of patches ignoring the rule - get_maintainers.pl does not work on arm64/configs/defconfig or any other shared ARM defconfig. Be more explicit, that one must not rely on typical/simple approach here for getting To/Cc list. Signed-off-by: Krzysztof Kozlowski Reviewed-by: Linus Walleij Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20251223142726.73417-3-krzysztof.kozlowski@oss.qualcomm.com Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann

docs: submitting-patches: Clarify that removal of Acks needs explanation too

2025-11-29T15:30:54+00:00

The paragraph mentions only removal of Tested-by and Reviewed-by tags as action needing mentioning in patch changelog, so some developers treat it too literally. Acks, as a weaker form of review/approval, should rarely be removed, but if that happens it should be explained as well. Signed-off-by: Krzysztof Kozlowski Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet Message-ID: <20251126081905.7684-2-krzysztof.kozlowski@oss.qualcomm.com>

coding-style: fix verb typo

2025-11-03T23:11:24+00:00

In the Identation section there is a list of instructions in second-person. The offending line uses third-person singular. Signed-off-by: Gabriele Ricciardi Acked-by: Randy Dunlap Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet Message-ID: <20251101223027.171874-1-gricciardi-coding@pm.me>

Documentation: process: Also mention Sasha Levin as stable tree maintainer

2025-10-29T22:19:27+00:00

Sasha has also maintaining stable branch in conjunction with Greg since cb5d21946d2a2f ("MAINTAINERS: Add Sasha as a stable branch maintainer"). Mention him in 2.Process.rst. Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Bagas Sanjaya Reviewed-by: Randy Dunlap Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet Message-ID: <20251022034336.22839-1-bagasdotme@gmail.com>

Documentation: process: Arbitrarily bump kernel major version number

2025-10-14T15:14:03+00:00

The big picture section of 2.Process.rst currently hardcodes major version number to 5 since fb0e0ffe7fc8e0 ("Documentation: bring process docs up to date"). As it can get outdated when it is actually incremented (the recent is 6 and will be 7 in the near future), arbitrarily bump it to 9, giving a headroom for a decade. Note that the version number examples are kept to illustrate the numbering scheme. Signed-off-by: Bagas Sanjaya [jc: tweaked the initial 9.x mention slightly] Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet Message-ID: <20250922074219.26241-1-bagasdotme@gmail.com>

Merge tag 'docs-6.18' of git://git.lwn.net/linux

2025-10-04T00:16:13+00:00

Pull documentation updates from Jonathan Corbet: "It has been a relatively busy cycle in docsland, with changes all over: - Bring the kernel memory-model docs into the Sphinx build in the "literal include" mode. - Lots of build-infrastructure work, further cleaning up long-term kernel-doc technical debt. The sphinx-pre-install tool has been converted to Python and updated for current systems. - A new tool to detect when documents have been moved and generate HTML redirects; this can be used on kernel.org (or any other site hosting the rendered docs) to avoid breaking links. - Automated processing of the YAML files describing the netlink protocol. - A significant update of the maintainer's PGP guide. ... and a seemingly endless series of typo fixes, build-problem fixes, etc" * tag 'docs-6.18' of git://git.lwn.net/linux: (193 commits) Documentation/features: Update feature lists for 6.17-rc7 docs: remove cdomain.py Documentation/process: submitting-patches: fix typo in "were do" docs: dev-tools/lkmm: Fix typo of missing file extension Documentation: trace: histogram: Convert ftrace docs cross-reference Documentation: trace: histogram-design: Wrap introductory note in note:: directive Documentation: trace: historgram-design: Separate sched_waking histogram section heading and the following diagram Documentation: trace: histogram-design: Trim trailing vertices in diagram explanation text Documentation: trace: histogram: Fix histogram trigger subsection number order docs: driver-api: fix spelling of "buses". Documentation: fbcon: Use admonition directives Documentation: fbcon: Reindent 8th step of attach/detach/unload Documentation: fbcon: Add boot options and attach/detach/unload section headings docs: filesystems: sysfs: add remaining top level sysfs directory descriptions docs: filesystems: sysfs: clarify symlink destinations in dev and bus/devices descriptions docs: filesystems: sysfs: remove top level sysfs net directory docs: maintainer: Fix ambiguous subheading formatting docs: kdoc: a few more dump_typedef() tweaks docs: kdoc: remove redundant comment stripping in dump_typedef() docs: kdoc: remove some dead code in dump_typedef() ...

Merge tag 'net-next-6.18' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net-next

2025-10-02T22:17:01+00:00

Pull networking updates from Paolo Abeni: "Core & protocols: - Improve drop account scalability on NUMA hosts for RAW and UDP sockets and the backlog, almost doubling the Pps capacity under DoS - Optimize the UDP RX performance under stress, reducing contention, revisiting the binary layout of the involved data structs and implementing NUMA-aware locking. This improves UDP RX performance by an additional 50%, even more under extreme conditions - Add support for PSP encryption of TCP connections; this mechanism has some similarities with IPsec and TLS, but offers superior HW offloads capabilities - Ongoing work to support Accurate ECN for TCP. AccECN allows more than one congestion notification signal per RTT and is a building block for Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S) - Reorganize the TCP socket binary layout for data locality, reducing the number of touched cachelines in the fastpath - Refactor skb deferral free to better scale on large multi-NUMA hosts, this improves TCP and UDP RX performances significantly on such HW - Increase the default socket memory buffer limits from 256K to 4M to better fit modern link speeds - Improve handling of setups with a large number of nexthop, making dump operating scaling linearly and avoiding unneeded synchronize_rcu() on delete - Improve bridge handling of VLAN FDB, storing a single entry per bridge instead of one entry per port; this makes the dump order of magnitude faster on large switches - Restore IP ID correctly for encapsulated packets at GSO segmentation time, allowing GRO to merge packets in more scenarios - Improve netfilter matching performance on large sets - Improve MPTCP receive path performance by leveraging recently introduced core infrastructure (skb deferral free) and adopting recent TCP autotuning changes - Allow bridges to redirect to a backup port when the bridge port is administratively down - Introduce MPTCP 'laminar' endpoint that con be used only once per connection and simplify common MPTCP setups - Add RCU safety to dst->dev, closing a lot of possible races - A significant crypto library API for SCTP, MPTCP and IPv6 SR, reducing code duplication - Supports pulling data from an skb frag into the linear area of an XDP buffer Things we sprinkled into general kernel code: - Generate netlink documentation from YAML using an integrated YAML parser Driver API: - Support using IPv6 Flow Label in Rx hash computation and RSS queue selection - Introduce API for fetching the DMA device for a given queue, allowing TCP zerocopy RX on more H/W setups - Make XDP helpers compatible with unreadable memory, allowing more easily building DevMem-enabled drivers with a unified XDP/skbs datapath - Add a new dedicated ethtool callback enabling drivers to provide the number of RX rings directly, improving efficiency and clarity in RX ring queries and RSS configuration - Introduce a burst period for the health reporter, allowing better handling of multiple errors due to the same root cause - Support for DPLL phase offset exponential moving average, controlling the average smoothing factor Device drivers: - Add a new Huawei driver for 3rd gen NIC (hinic3) - Add a new SpacemiT driver for K1 ethernet MAC - Add a generic abstraction for shared memory communication devices (dibps) - Ethernet high-speed NICs: - nVidia/Mellanox: - Use multiple per-queue doorbell, to avoid MMIO contention issues - support adjacent functions, allowing them to delegate their SR-IOV VFs to sibling PFs - support RSS for IPSec offload - support exposing raw cycle counters in PTP and mlx5 - support for disabling host PFs. - Intel (100G, ice, idpf): - ice: support for SRIOV VFs over an Active-Active link aggregate - ice: support for firmware logging via debugfs - ice: support for Earliest TxTime First (ETF) hardware offload - idpf: support basic XDP functionalities and XSk - Broadcom (bnxt): - support Hyper-V VF ID - dynamic SRIOV resource allocations for RoCE - Meta (fbnic): - support queue API, zero-copy Rx and Tx - support basic XDP functionalities - devlink health support for FW crashes and OTP mem corruptions - expand hardware stats coverage to FEC, PHY, and Pause - Wangxun: - support ethtool coalesce options - support for multiple RSS contexts - Ethernet virtual: - Macsec: - replace custom netlink attribute checks with policy-level checks - Bonding: - support aggregator selection based on port priority - Microsoft vNIC: - use page pool fragments for RX buffers instead of full pages to improve memory efficiency - Ethernet NICs consumer, and embedded: - Qualcomm: support Ethernet function for IPQ9574 SoC - Airoha: implement wlan offloading via NPU - Freescale - enetc: add NETC timer PTP driver and add PTP support - fec: enable the Jumbo frame support for i.MX8QM - Renesas (R-Car S4): - support HW offloading for layer 2 switching - support for RZ/{T2H, N2H} SoCs - Cadence (macb): support TAPRIO traffic scheduling - TI: - support for Gigabit ICSS ethernet SoC (icssm-prueth) - Synopsys (stmmac): a lot of cleanups - Ethernet PHYs: - Support 10g-qxgmi phy-mode for AQR412C, Felix DSA and Lynx PCS driver - Support bcm63268 GPHY power control - Support for Micrel lan8842 PHY and PTP - Support for Aquantia AQR412 and AQR115 - CAN: - a large CAN-XL preparation work - reorganize raw_sock and uniqframe struct to minimize memory usage - rcar_canfd: update the CAN-FD handling - WiFi: - extended Neighbor Awareness Networking (NAN) support - S1G channel representation cleanup - improve S1G support - WiFi drivers: - Intel (iwlwifi): - major refactor and cleanup - Broadcom (brcm80211): - support for AP isolation - RealTek (rtw88/89) rtw88/89: - preparation work for RTL8922DE support - MediaTek (mt76): - HW restart improvements - MLO support - Qualcomm/Atheros (ath10k): - GTK rekey fixes - Bluetooth drivers: - btusb: support for several new IDs for MT7925 - btintel: support for BlazarIW core - btintel_pcie: support for _suspend() / _resume() - btintel_pcie: support for Scorpious, Panther Lake-H484 IDs" * tag 'net-next-6.18' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net-next: (1536 commits) net: stmmac: Add support for Allwinner A523 GMAC200 dt-bindings: net: sun8i-emac: Add A523 GMAC200 compatible Revert "Documentation: net: add flow control guide and document ethtool API" octeontx2-pf: fix bitmap leak octeontx2-vf: fix bitmap leak net/mlx5e: Use extack in set rxfh callback net/mlx5e: Introduce mlx5e_rss_params for RSS configuration net/mlx5e: Introduce mlx5e_rss_init_params net/mlx5e: Remove unused mdev param from RSS indir init net/mlx5: Improve QoS error messages with actual depth values net/mlx5e: Prevent entering switchdev mode with inconsistent netns net/mlx5: HWS, Generalize complex matchers net/mlx5: Improve write-combining test reliability for ARM64 Grace CPUs selftests/net: add tcp_port_share to .gitignore Revert "net/mlx5e: Update and set Xon/Xoff upon MTU set" net: add NUMA awareness to skb_attempt_defer_free() net: use llist for sd->defer_list net: make softnet_data.defer_count an atomic selftests: drv-net: psp: add tests for destroying devices selftests: drv-net: psp: add test for auto-adjusting TCP MSS ...