Comment by Gigachad
10 months ago
Because forked kernels is how we ended up with all those SBCs which could only run some ancient version of linux. If you can't mainline it, you are committing to maintaining a fork forever, and the more changes you require, the more maintenance that fork will be.
The Linux kernel quite intentionally makes maintaining a fork a pain in the ass to pressure vendors to mainline their drives. But now mainline maintainers are refusing to accept those drivers. So it's unlikely we will ever see Macbooks properly supported on Linux.
But the Rust advocates are already telling everyone that they will handle all maintenance of rust code in the kernel and existing maintainers won't have to do a thing. If that was true it wouldn't matter if the rust code is in a separate tree.
Upstreaming to linux-zen might work, not a kernel dev tho.