Christoph Helvig (Christoph Hellwig) has stepped down from his positions in the DMA-Mapping and Configfs subsystems. The departure was formalized through the submission of an application for removal from the main list and a message transferring the management of the remaining accompaniment. In the DMA-Mapping subsystem, Marek Szypringski from Samsung and Joel Becker from Oracle will continue in their roles. Christoph Helvig maintains his involvement with the NVM Express subsystems, VMALLOC, and FreeVXFS.
Up until now, Christoph Helvig has been a key figure in various Linux subsystems such as XFS, KVM, Trace Events, SCSI, and SLAB Allocator. He was also part of the Linux Foundation Technical Committee and contributed to the support of the PowerPC architecture within the Linux kernel. Furthermore, Christoph was involved in legal proceedings against VMware for GPL license violations.
The decision to step down from maintaining the DMA-Mapping and Configfs subsystems was influenced by Linus Torvalds’ plans to introduce the RUST language into the kernel without the consent of the subsystem maintainers. Christoph opposed the inclusion of rust-related functions for working with DMA in the kernel, which resulted in conflicts leading to the departure of developers from Nouveau and ARM/Apple. On February 24, a patch was proposed by Rust developers for Linux, adding a layer of abstraction for FS configfs, an initiative supported by Christoph Helvig. However, Christoph chose not to participate in further discussions and subsequently removed himself from the DMA-Mapping and Configfs maintainers list.
Christoph Helvig believes that using multiple programming languages in complex projects such as the Linux kernel is unacceptable. He argues that mixed code bases create dependencies and complicate the work of subsystem maintainers. Changes in data structures or internal functions on one language can impact code written in another language, requiring synchronized updates to ensure compatibility. Christoph emphasizes the need for consistency in the codebase to maintain the efficiency and integrity of the Linux kernel.