Maintainers

The kernel has hundreds of maintained subsystems. Authoritative ownership lives in the MAINTAINERS file at the repository root, which is parsed by scripts/get_maintainer.pl. This page summarizes how ownership is structured and points at the authoritative source.

How to find the maintainer of a file

./scripts/get_maintainer.pl path/to/file.c
./scripts/get_maintainer.pl path/to/changeset.patch

The tool returns the maintainer(s), reviewers (R:), and the relevant mailing list (L:) for the file or patch.

High-level subsystem ownership

(Indicative summary; consult MAINTAINERS for the canonical list.)

Subsystem	Tip-of-tree maintainer(s)	Subsystem tree
Linux as a whole	Linus Torvalds	torvalds/linux.git
Stable kernel trees	Greg Kroah-Hartman + stable team	linux-stable.git
ARM64	Catalin Marinas, Will Deacon	linux-arm64.git
x86	x86 maintainers (Thomas Gleixner, Ingo Molnár, Dave Hansen, Borislav Petkov, …)	tip.git
RISC-V	Palmer Dabbelt + team	linux-riscv.git
PowerPC	Michael Ellerman + team	linuxppc.git
s390	Heiko Carstens, Vasily Gorbik	linux-s390.git
Memory management	Andrew Morton	mm (in linux-next)
Scheduler	Peter Zijlstra, Ingo Molnár, Thomas Gleixner, Vincent Guittot	tip.git sched/core
Networking	Jakub Kicinski, Paolo Abeni, David Ahern, Eric Dumazet	net.git / net-next.git
BPF	Alexei Starovoitov, Andrii Nakryiko, Daniel Borkmann, Martin Lau	bpf.git / bpf-next.git
Block layer	Jens Axboe	linux-block.git
io_uring	Jens Axboe	linux-block.git io_uring
Filesystems (VFS, vfs maintainers)	Christian Brauner + Al Viro	vfs.git
ext4	Theodore Ts'o	ext4.git
btrfs	David Sterba + team	btrfs.git
xfs	Chandan Babu R + team	xfs.git
f2fs	Jaegeuk Kim	f2fs.git
KVM	Paolo Bonzini, Sean Christopherson + per-arch	kvm.git
DRM (graphics)	Daniel Vetter, Dave Airlie + per-driver	drm.git, per-vendor trees
Security	James Morris + per-LSM (Paul Moore SELinux, John Johansen AppArmor, …)	per-tree
Crypto API	Herbert Xu	cryptodev.git
Sound (ALSA, ASoC)	Takashi Iwai (ALSA), Mark Brown (ASoC)	sound.git, asoc.git
Cgroups	Tejun Heo	cgroup.git
Workqueue	Tejun Heo	wq.git
Rust support	Miguel Ojeda + team	rust.git
Kbuild / kconfig	Masahiro Yamada	kbuild.git
RCU	Paul E. McKenney	rcu.git
perf events	Peter Zijlstra + perf team	tip.git perf/core
ftrace / tracing	Steven Rostedt + team	linux-trace.git
USB	Greg Kroah-Hartman + per-class	usb.git
PCI	Bjorn Helgaas	pci.git
TTY / serial	Greg Kroah-Hartman	tty.git

How patches flow

graph LR
    PATCH[Patch on mailing list] --> SUB[Subsystem maintainer applies to subsystem tree]
    SUB --> NEXT[linux-next]
    NEXT -->|merge window| LINUS[Linus' tree]
    LINUS --> RELEASE[Tagged release]
    RELEASE --> STABLE[Stable trees pick fixes]

linux-next is rebuilt nightly from many subsystem trees; it catches cross-subsystem build breakage early.

Reading MAINTAINERS

The format is documented at the top of MAINTAINERS. Each section looks like:

EXT4 FILE SYSTEM
M:    Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
M:    ...
R:    ...    (reviewer, optional)
L:    linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org
S:    Maintained
T:    git git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tytso/ext4.git
F:    fs/ext4/
F:    Documentation/filesystems/ext4/
F:    include/linux/ext4*

F: lists files this section owns; M: is the maintainer; R: reviewer; L: mailing list; S: status (Maintained, Supported, Obsolete, Buried, Orphaned).

Code of Conduct and conduct contacts

The project has a Code of Conduct (Documentation/process/code-of-conduct.rst). Conduct concerns go to the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) at conduct@kernel.org. The TAB rotates; current membership is publicized.

Related pages

• How to contribute — the patch flow.
• How to contribute → Development workflow — get_maintainer.pl usage.