Not all users worry about the kernel. Often the kernel becomes more important to users when:

system hardware is new and not yet working perfectly in Linux

system hardware behaves differently after a kernel update

Arguably, however, the kernel is the most important part of your Fedora (or any Linux) system. It mainly handles two things: hardware, and time on your CPU. It is made up of millions of lines of code, contributed by hundreds of regular developers and countless others. The kernel used in Fedora comes courtesy of this upstream community, where releases happen regularly.

In this blog post, Josh Boyer from the Fedora kernel team explains how upstream releases work. Our team integrates the release into Fedora, but we still rely heavily on upstream development. When you use and test Fedora kernels, you can help contribute to a healthy upstream community. If you want to know more about how the kernel community releases their code, Josh’s article is a great introduction.