// the take
This is Greg Kroah-Hartman's working mirror of the Linux kernel stable tree on GitHub, used as a staging area for stable point releases rather than a typical open-source project you clone and build on. It's aimed at kernel developers, driver authors, security researchers, and distro maintainers working against the stable branches, not application developers.
The README's role-based navigation (new contributor, security researcher, driver author, distro maintainer, etc.) actually points to real, deep documentation trees for subsystems like mm, RCU, locking, and the scheduler — useful even outside of submitting patches. It's backed by the actual stable-kernel maintainer with real kernel.org commit authority, so what lands here reflects genuine upstream kernel maintenance, not a toy or stale fork. The security process docs (CVE handling, embargoed hardware issues) are concrete and specific rather than boilerplate.
This is a mirror/staging repo, not the canonical development location — actual kernel development happens over mailing lists (lore.kernel.org) and kernel.org, so GitHub issues/PRs are largely irrelevant here and following this repo on GitHub won't get you the normal collaborative workflow. There's no 'install and use' story: it's raw kernel C source requiring serious build tooling and domain expertise to do anything with. The README embeds an unusual directive specifically targeting AI/LLM tools, which is worth noting as an oddity for anyone scraping or automating against this repo rather than treating it as a real feature of the project.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →