DAMON Maintainer Entry Profile

The DAMON subsystem covers the files that are listed in ‘DATA ACCESS MONITOR’ section of ‘MAINTAINERS’ file.

The mailing lists for the subsystem are damon@lists.linux.dev and linux-mm@kvack.org. Patches should be made against the mm-unstable tree whenever possible and posted to the mailing lists.

SCM Trees

There are multiple Linux trees for DAMON development. Patches under development or testing are queued in damon/next by the DAMON maintainer. Sufficiently reviewed patches will be queued in mm-unstable by the memory management subsystem maintainer. After more sufficient tests, the patches will be queued in mm-stable, and finally pull-requested to the mainline by the memory management subsystem maintainer.

Note again the patches for mm-unstable tree are queued by the memory management subsystem maintainer. If the patches requires some patches in damon/next tree which not yet merged in mm-unstable, please make sure the requirement is clearly specified.

Submit checklist addendum

When making DAMON changes, you should do below.

  • Build changes related outputs including kernel and documents.

  • Ensure the builds introduce no new errors or warnings.

  • Run and ensure no new failures for DAMON selftests and kunittests.

Further doing below and putting the results will be helpful.

Key cycle dates

Patches can be sent anytime. Key cycle dates of the mm-unstable and mm-stable trees depend on the memory management subsystem maintainer.

Review cadence

The DAMON maintainer does the work on the usual work hour (09:00 to 17:00, Mon-Fri) in PT (Pacific Time). The response to patches will occasionally be slow. Do not hesitate to send a ping if you have not heard back within a week of sending a patch.

Mailing tool

Like many other Linux kernel subsystems, DAMON uses the mailing lists (damon@lists.linux.dev and linux-mm@kvack.org) as the major communication channel. There is a simple tool called HacKerMaiL (hkml), which is for people who are not very familiar with the mailing lists based communication. The tool could be particularly helpful for DAMON community members since it is developed and maintained by DAMON maintainer. The tool is also officially announced to support DAMON and general Linux kernel development workflow.

In other words, hkml is a mailing tool for DAMON community, which DAMON maintainer is committed to support. Please feel free to try and report issues or feature requests for the tool to the maintainer.

Community meetup

DAMON community is maintaining two bi-weekly meetup series for community members who prefer synchronous conversations over mails.

The first one is for any discussion between every community member. No reservation is needed.

The seconds one is for discussions on specific topics between restricted members including the maintainer. The maintainer shares the available time slots, and attendees should reserve one of those at least 24 hours before the time slot, by reaching out to the maintainer.

Schedules and available reservation time slots are available at the Google doc. There is also a public Google calendar that has the events. Anyone can subscribe it. DAMON maintainer will also provide periodic reminder to the mailing list (damon@lists.linux.dev).