b. 1969, United States — Linux Foundation Fellow; maintainer of the stable kernel branch
Also known as: Kroah-Hartman, gregkh, GKH
Greg Kroah-Hartman has been a Linux kernel developer since the late 1990s and is the long-running maintainer of the kernel's stable and long-term-support branches — the branches that almost every distribution actually ships. He is Linus Torvalds's principal lieutenant: if Torvalds is the project's dictator, Kroah- Hartman is the calmer, more pragmatic deputy who keeps production systems running between merges.
He has maintained major subsystems over the years (USB, driver core, staging) and wrote the book Linux Kernel in a Nutshell (2006). Since 2012 he has been a Linux Foundation Fellow, paid to work on the kernel full-time.
Kroah-Hartman is known for a characteristic he has made almost doctrinal: stable kernel updates every week, with tested fixes from mainline. This discipline is why production Linux systems can apply security fixes confidently — the stable trees are not ambitious, they are reliable.
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Related people: Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Lennart Poettering
Works cited in this book:
- Linux Device Drivers (2005) (with Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini)
- Linux Kernel in a Nutshell (2020)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 3: The Linux Kernel — How the Kernel Is Developed
