Linus Torvalds suspends Bcachefs developer for code-of-conduct violation

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Linus Torvalds has quietly announced to Kent Overstreet that he will leave changes prepared by the Bcache developer for integration into Linux 6.13 on the left. The Linux inventor and lead programmer is thus apparently suspending Overstreet for at least one of the nine or ten week development cycles. It remains to be seen what impact this will have on the further development of Bcachefs within or beyond the Linux kernel; Overstreet himself describes its future as "uncertain".

Consequence of a breach of the code of conduct

With this step, Torvalds is implementing a request from the committee responsible for the kernel's Code of Conduct (COC), as Overstreet himself writes. This was triggered by "an open issue with the COC committee". The Bcache developer claims not to know what is going on with the committee and refers to problems with the culture, for which he then provides several examples.

It is only many paragraphs later that Overstreet comes to an incident in his 36,000-character text (about a dozen A4 pages when printed out) that got the whole thing rolling: Hurtful statements towards other Linux developers. The COC committee, which meets in private, decided that there had been more than just one of these from his side in the last six months – with which he had exceeded the limits of good behavior and the Linux Code of Conduct.

Numerous developers took offense at statements

The most problematic statement was probably one in which he advised a respected developer of the memory management code to have his head examined and "get the fuck out of here".

The Linux kernel developer community has a reputation for bad manners, but over the last ten years it has been better than its reputation. This statement by Overstreet therefore marks an extreme low point in recent years, which was also a thorn in the side of many Linux kernel developers, as unofficial and official discussions at conferences held in mid-September showed.

Many feared that Torvalds might not put the Bcachefs inventor in his place. The latter had previously turned a blind eye several times when Overstreet did not adhere to the usual procedures when developing and contributing code, thereby stepping on the toes of numerous developers –, including Torvalds himself, who then threatened to throw Bcachefs out again.

Earlier problems surrounding the development of Bcachefs

The file system code is still considered experimental and was only incorporated into Linux 6.7 around a year ago, after Overstreet had developed it externally over many years, largely on his own. Before and after its inclusion, he repeatedly offended other Bcachefs colleagues, who then turned their attention to other projects. Criticism of the Debian packages with the Bcachefs file system tools also caused a stir, causing the responsible Debian maintainer to throw in the towel shortly afterwards.

Despite such escapades and the still early stage of development, Bcachefs has a veritable fan cult among some Linux users – - no wonder, as Bcachefs promises to offer what many had hoped for from Btrfs or appreciate about ZFS. Such arguments are nothing unusual for a topic like this, but the volume is unusually high and the tone often unusually harsh even for kernel circles.

This then led to complaints about Overstreet to the COC committee submitted a few years ago. So far, however, the committee has had to deal with smaller incidents, in which developers usually show understanding and apologize publicly.

Specially introduced rules for sanctioning

As a result, there were also no rules to sanction unacceptable behavior.

The committee has drafted these recently. They were incorporated into the kernel documentation on Wednesday evening; a few hours later, Overstreet then published the aforementioned text on the Patreon funding platform, which he has used for many years to collect donations to finance the development of Bcachefs. In the lengthy comments, he explains that he is not prepared to make a public apology to the memory management developer for the above statement.

(mki)