It might be time to put away the popcorn. Phoronix today reported that Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman reverted 37 patches associated with the University of Minnesota (UMN), which he banned from contributing to the kernel in April. This came via a pull request to Linux 5.13 Release Candidate 3 (5.13-rc3) submitted on Thursday.
“The majority here is the fallout of the umn.edu re-review of all prior submissions,” Kroah-Hartman said in the pull request for these changes. “That resulted in a bunch of reverts along with the ‘correct’ changes made, such that there is no regression of any of the potential fixes that were made by those individuals. I would like to thank the over 80 different developers who helped with the review and fixes for this mess.”
UMN was banned from contributing to the Linux kernel in April following two research projects — one into “hypocrite commits” and one the researchers said was meant to “automatically identify bugs introduced by other patches (not from us)”—that drew ire from the Linux developer community. The Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) ended up reviewing 435 contributions associated with UMN.
TAB released the findings of that review two weeks ago. The final tally showed that many of UMN’s contributions were made in good faith: 349 contributions were “found to be correct,” 39 were “found to be incorrect and in need of fixing” and the remaining 47 were essentially deemed irrelevant. But it still made it clear that UMN would have to make changes if it wanted to regain the Linux community’s trust.
Those changes include a more thorough review process for proposed research projects and the addition of an experienced Linux developer who could stop contentious projects from “getting beyond the idea stage.” UMN’s Department of Computer Science & Engineering acknowledged TAB’s report, but it doesn’t appear to have clarified its response to these issues beyond that brief statement.
Phoronix said the changes included in Kroah-Hartman’s pull request affect the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, networking features and other aspects of the Linux kernel. More information about scope of the changes are in the message accompanying the pull request.
Linux 5.13-rc3 should be available via The Linux Kernel Archives soon; 5.13 proper is expected to debut this summer.