Con Kolivas Contemplates Ending Kernel Development, Retiring MuQSS & -ck Patches

Con Kolivas has worked on many patches for the Linux kernel over the past two decades and particularly focused on innovations around desktop performance/interactivity. For over a decade now he's primarily been focused on maintaining his work out-of-tree and not catering to mainline acceptance but now he is thinking of bowing out once more and ending his kernel development effort.

Over the past decade he's been maintaining his "-ck" patches out-of-tree and updating them for each new kernel series with a variety of improvements to enhance the interactivity and performance of the kernel. He's also been maintaining his MuQSS scheduler that is the successor to his former "BFS" Brain Fuck Scheduler.

While Con's work in recent times hasn't been mainlined, these patches have been carried by some distribution kernels and various third-party kernel builds like Liquorix and friends.

With Con Kolivas being a anaesthetist by profession and just a kernel hacker as a devoted hobbyist, last year he took a break from kernel development to design COVID-19 equipment during the early days of the pandemic. However, now he's looking at taking a longer break or potentially a permanent departure from Linux kernel work.

Con didn't get around to updating MuQSS and his -ck patches for Linux 5.13 and now with Linux 5.14 recently minted, he's been self-reflecting given the "depressingly large" changes at hand. He shared today that he's thinking of ending his -ck / MuQSS effort so for now at least no updates are planned past the existing Linux 5.12 patches.

Con wrote on his blog, "I'm once again left wondering if I should be bothering with maintaining this patch-set, as I've mentioned before on this blog. The size of my user-base seems to be diminishing with time, and I'm getting further and further out of touch with what's happening in the linux kernel space at all, with countless other things to preoccupy me in my spare time."

He further added, "There is always the possibility that mainline linux kernel will be so bad that I'll be forced to create a new kernel of my own out of disgust, which is how I got here in the first place, but that looks very unlikely. Many of you would have anticipated this coming after my last motivation blog-post, but unless I can find the motivation to work on it again, or something comes up that gives me a meaningful reason to work on it, I will have to sadly declare 5.12-ck the last of the MuQSS and -ck patches."