// the take
A long-running slide deck and notes from Greg Kroah-Hartman's talk on how Linux kernel development actually works: release cadence, patch flow, who contributes, and the numbers behind it. Aimed at developers, managers, or press who want a straight answer to 'how does this huge project not fall apart' without wading into kernel source itself.
The stats are pulled from real git history across releases rather than asserted, and the graphs (patches per hour, CVEs per release, lines of code over time) make the scale of the process concrete instead of abstract. It's been delivered and iterated at enough venues (OSCON, OLS, companies, universities) that the numbers and framing have had years of real audience pushback to sharpen them. Straightforward to repurpose: the raw .odp/.pdf files and graph-generation scripts are there if you want current numbers for your own talk.
It's a slide deck, not a tool or library, so there's nothing to integrate or depend on. The generation scripts (Ruby/Perl) are tied to a specific, likely stale toolchain and aren't documented as runnable out of the box. Licensing is Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, which blocks commercial reuse of the material without separate permission, and the content reflects kernel development as of whatever release cycle it was last updated for, not necessarily current process.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →