Hi all, I am a Ph.D. student from China. Our research team is dedicated to helping FLOSS ecosystems have healthy and sustainable development. The Linux kernel is one of the key study cases for us because as a prominent FLOSS project, the Linux kernel has many unique practices. Recently, we observed that increasing numbers of contributors to the Linux kernel have concerns regarding whether the development process (workflow) can handle the current mass of patches and even more patches in the future. While the workflow gives maintainers many rights, it also places significant pressure on them, which bears the risk of a single point of failure. We investigated the effect of a new model, the multiple-committer model, which is currently used by the i915 subsystem to alleviate the burden on its maintainer. We find that this model can reduce the proportion of the review workload of the busiest maintainer, reduce the review latency and maintainers' overwork, and simplify the review network. The review process is strictly enforced to guarantee the quality of patches. Subsystems with usage demands, mechanisms for ensuring patch quality, and candidate committers are suitable for the model. Sufficient precommit testing, a strict review process, necessary documentation, and the use of automatic tools are important practices to follow when applying the model. We hope our work would help other subsystems extract valuable information and optimize their workflow to achieve a more efficient review process and sustain themselves in a constantly changing, complicated environment. We uploaded the draft paper at "https://github.com/SunflowerPKU/Reducing-the-Workload-of-the-Linux-Kernel-Maintainers-Multiple-Committer-Model/blob/master/reduce-workload-linux.pdf". If you are interested in this topic, please take a moment to understand our work. We are looking forward to your comments and suggestions.
Best regard, Xin Tan