Chris Mason Leaves Meta and Steps Down as Btrfs Maintainer

One of the veterans of Linux kernel development, Chris Mason, has announced on the LKML mailing list that he is leaving Meta. Along with this, he is stepping down from his role as maintainer of the Btrfs file system, which he himself founded in 2007 while working at Oracle.

In essence, the change merely formalizes a state of affairs that has existed for a long time. In recent years Mason was no longer an active Btrfs maintainer — the bulk of the work has been carried by David Sterba of SUSE, who effectively leads the project. That makes removing Mason from the list of maintainers a logical step. From now on he will take part in the development of Btrfs as a code reviewer.

The immediate trigger was a technical detail: work addresses on the meta.com and fb.com domains will soon stop functioning, and while updating his entry in the MAINTAINERS file, Mason decided to shed his formal maintainer status at the same time.

During his time at Meta, Mason helped roll out Btrfs across the company's infrastructure and also made numerous contributions to other parts of the kernel as a member of the Linux team. The news of his departure came as something of a surprise: on Thursday he announced that his last working day would be Friday.

In his message, Mason emphasized that his departure does not affect Meta's plans: the company's commitment to the kernel and to Btrfs remains unchanged, as will his own contributions to the kernel.

“This update better reflects the fact that I handed off most of the Btrfs maintainer duties years ago. Huge thanks to David Sterba and all of the Btrfs developers for their work on advancing the file system,” he wrote.

Mason did not reveal his further plans, noting only that he would continue to take part in kernel development wherever he goes next. In recent years, in addition to Btrfs, he has been involved in initiatives around artificial intelligence — in particular, applying AI to review Linux kernel code.

Source: Phoronix