Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux kernel's stable branch and the Linux driver project, is leaving his position with SUSE to join the Linux Foundation in a full-time fellowship role. Kroah-Hartman will now have more time to oversee kernel development and work with the Linux community, while leaving aside the responsibility of working for a vendor. (The SUSE Linux project was owned by Novell, and now Attachmate.)

"There were no direct conflicts working for SUSE, as the people there understand how important the individual developer, and their voice, is in the Linux community," Kroah-Hartman told Ars this week in an e-mail interview. "But, working in a vendor-neutral environment like the Linux Foundation allows me to spend a larger amount of time interacting with other companies and vendors, as well as helping Linux out in environments that were not necessarily the focus of my previous employer."

Kroah-Hartman was a fellow at SUSE, where he spent seven years, and his last day with the project was Tuesday of this week. Kroah-Hartman, who lives near Seattle, now joins several other fellows at the Linux Foundation, most notably Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds. In his role maintaining the Linux driver project, which he also created, Kroah-Hartman helped nudge Microsoft into submitting drivers that let the Hyper-V virtualization software work with Linux-based operating systems. In addition to the Linux stable kernel branch and driver project, he maintains the code for a variety of Linux subsystems.

With Kroah-Hartman expanding his already considerable influence over the Linux world, he answered a few questions from Ars about the current state of Linux and its future.

What's next for Linux?

We asked Kroah-Hartman which areas of Linux he'd like to see gain more development resources, and if he's expecting any major advancements in fields like power management and virtualization. "We always say that Linux kernel development is 'evolution, not intelligent design,' in that solutions are found to problems as they come up, so making forecasts as to what is going to happen in the future is always quite difficult," he noted. "Right now, I do not know of any specific areas that are needing more resources. Power management and virtualization both have numerous talented developers already working on the issues involved, and both are areas that are advancing quite rapidly."

Kroah-Hartman's goals to improve Linux are more about creating a better process. "My personal goals are to make the ability to create Linux kernel code easier, reducing and removing barriers that people find to become members of the community, as well as ensuring that Linux works for all new hardware platforms that are created," he said. "Focusing on helping companies, and individuals, become part of the kernel development team are things that I am going to be focusing on, be it improvements in internal kernel APIs to make them easier to use, or just simple education efforts to help others understand what the steps are to get involved."

Linux in the mobile world

When we asked Kroah-Hartman if improving Linux on mobile devices is one of his top goals, he scoffed, saying "As Linux is the number one embedded operating system, how could I make it any better? :)"

To the question of whether Android's huge popularity has changed Linux development, he said "It has increased the number of different companies and individuals contributing to the kernel development project, which is a very good thing. The larger our community is, the better we scale, and keep up to date with newer hardware platforms."

Microsoft's contributions to Linux

Kroah-Hartman was instrumental in bringing Microsoft's Hyper-V into the Linux fold, a project started in 2009 after it was revealed Microsoft violated the GPL free software license by using open source components in a Hyper-V driver.

Today, work with Microsoft is going well, Kroah-Hartman said. "The code has been in the Linux kernel for a few years now, and has recently moved out of the staging area of the kernel, into the main portion of the different kernel subsystems for the specific drivers," he said.

When asked if he's happy with Microsoft's contributions to Linux, he said "I am very happy with their contributions. The work that they have done on their drivers is amazing. The original driver submission was over 20 thousand lines long. Two new drivers have been added to the codebase, and lots of cleanup, making the final line count around 7 thousand lines. This shrinkage shows that working with the kernel community enables companies to reduce the size of their code, making things faster, easier to maintain, and less buggy."

The obligatory question about desktop Linux

Finally, we also asked Kroah-Hartman which desktop Linux distribution and user interface he prefers, and whether he can do anything in his new role to promote Linux on the desktop. "I've used Linux as a desktop for 15 years now, so I don't understand the infatuation that people seem to have about this issue," he said. "I personally use GNOME on my desktops. As for the desktop market share, this is not a problem that the community can do much about, it is a business decision by the various hardware manufacturers as to if they wish to ship Linux or not."