The 2026 Maintainers Summit

What happened

Unsurprisingly, the discussion there was dominated by large language model (the kind of AI system trained on text to produce text)s (LLMs) and their effect on the development community, but some time was also found to talk about security bugs and long-term succession planning. The Maintainers Summit is a one-day, invitation-only gathering of about 30 kernel developers; it is held once each year to discuss policy-related issues that are not always amenable to resolution via email. The 2026 event was scheduled for October 8 in Prague, Czechia.