COUNTING KROAHS
Greg Kroah-Hartman is a man who needs no introduction. Sadly intros are strictly required by our interview template, so here goes: he has been described as the gentle giant of the Linux kernel. He’s custodian of the USB, PCI hotplug, Userspace I/O and debugfs kernel subsystems (not an exhaustive list), and he sits on the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board. He’s even featured in Linux Format before, in 2006 (LXF81, back when we had budgets exceeding a pittance).
Jonni Bidwell was understandably starstruck and giddy when the towering figure agreed to talk drivers, desktop Linux and other diversions in a dimly lit meeting room in the Centre de Congrès de Lyon, while outside excited attendees mingled with open source luminaries at the Linux Foundation’s 2019 Open Source Summit.
Linux Format: I guess we’ll start with conferences. You go to loads of them. I get to go to one a year (and you should be thankful, the rest of us aren’t allowed out of the office at all – Ed). Why are these a good idea?
Greg Kroah-Hartman (GKH) We do most of our development and communications through email, which is not very personal. Sometimes you need to actually meet with people and put a face to that name behind an email. 17 or 18 years ago, when we started doing kernel developer conferences, we realised that we’d never met each other. So conferences are really important for that.
And it’s a way to transfer knowledge. There are loads of sessions where you can teach or learn new things. The tutorials here are really excellent. I travel around a lot and give talks, meet developers and try to bring them into the community.
Also, some cultures actually require face-to-face communication before you can begin to talk over email. So it can be a
