It's Been A Quiet Year-End For BUS1, The Proposed In-Kernel IPC For Linux

With the Linux 4.10 kernel merge window expected to open this weekend, I was digging around to see whether there was anything new on the BUS1 front and whether we might see it for the next kernel cycle.

While I have yet to see any official communication from the BUS1 developers, it doesn't look like it's happening for BUS1. In fact, it's been a rather quiet past few weeks for these developers working on this in-kernel IPC mechanism to succeed the never-merged KDBUS.

The BUS1 Git repository hasn't seen any commits since the end of October. There's also a "bus2" branch but that too hasn't seen work in two months. There are also outstanding pull requests against BUS1, all of which were open toward the end of October and haven't seen any recent activity. Though with their GitHub the most recent activity was updating some documentation three weeks ago.

At the end of October is when BUS1 was posted for review by upstream kernel developers under a "RFC" flag. There were a number of comments posted by kernel developers, but since then there hasn't been any new patch series for review. Thus it doesn't look like BUS1 will be proposed for integration into Linux 4.10 unless there's been a lot of work going on behind the scenes. Those not up to speed on BUS1 for Linux IPC can see their PDF slides from this year's Linux Plumbers Conference for more details. Coincidentally, today marks one year since we were first writing about BUS1.