We’re thrilled to announce that the KernelCI project has officially joined the Linux Foundation and that BayLibre is a founding member company along with Google, Collabora, Red Hat, Foundries.io and Microsoft. BayLibre’s Kevin Hilman was one of the original founders of kernelci.org in 2014, and since then Kevin and the BayLibre team have continued to contribute changes. This announcement is a milestone for the project, and the support from the Linux Foundation demonstrates how essential automated testing at scale is for the Linux kernel community.
KernelCI is a true battle-tested open-source project and is a vital tool for the upstream Linux kernel maintainers, allowing them to merge large numbers of changes during the merge window while still maintaining quality and stability. Thanks to the collection of board farms located in hardware labs around the world, new changes are boot and runtime tested across a wide range of devices and hardware, and results are checked via the KernelCI infrastructure before being applied to the official maintainer repositories.
We think this is the start of a really exciting time for KernelCI. With the help of the Linux Foundation, infrastructure costs will be covered and the overall operation of the service will be improved. Which means the project’s members will be able to focus on new ways to grow the testing service and make it even better.
We’re looking forward to the next stage of the KernelCI project, and continuing to help increase the long-term maintainability of the Linux kernel.
If you want to learn more about KernelCI, including how you can get involved, check out the kernelci.org website and the mailing list.