Many moons ago, some discussions were being held around having common container images with toolchains maintained by the upstream Linux kernel communi

kernel.org containers

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2024-09-30 20:30:06

Many moons ago, some discussions were being held around having common container images with toolchains maintained by the upstream Linux kernel community. It didn’t quite happen back then, TuxMake was launched by Linaro soon after with images forked from the KernelCI ones and they have been diverging ever since. Where do things stand now?

There does seem to be a trend forming in 2024. The debate around using GitLab CI for testing the upstream kernel has been revived and TuxMake has now started supporting containers with the kernel.org toolchains. It looked like all the stars were finally lining up so I picked this topic up again and took the time to articulate it with a proposal: first as an email discussion followed by a Linux Plumbers talk. Both have been well received with some constructive feedback and ideas. Concrete steps are now forming down that path; let’s take a look at a potential way forward.

Lots of things have already been done to improve development workflows and quality control for the Linux kernel. Some of them are directly available upstream and have become second nature such as Git, test frameworks (kselftest, KUnit) and HTML documentation. As the software world keeps turning, new tools become de facto standard among all developers and the upstream kernel community is no exception - within reason, of course. One of the most obvious ones are containers: Docker was voted #1 used tool on the 2023 Stack Overflow survey and again in 2024.