Announcing Microsoft's contribution of 20,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel this morning, the company called it the beginning of the process, not the end -- promising to be an active participant in the ongoing development of the code under the open-source community.
Microsoft is contributing the driver code to help Linux distributions run on its Hyper-V virtualization technology on Windows Server 2008. But how exactly will Microsoft be involved? Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel developer and Novell fellow who oversees the Linux Driver Project, answered our questions and explained the process in a phone interview.
How the process is structured: "It's a big, widespread community, but every part of the kernel has a maintainer. So everything is divided up into maintainers and subsystem maintainers. It's a big tree hierarchy. Microsoft's developers are going to be responsible for maintaining this bit of code. Any changes they make they'll send off to me, who happens to maintain the area in which this code is going to live in. Then I will batch up these changes and send them off to Linus (Torvalds) when we do merges for the main kernel tree."
more
No comments:
Post a Comment