"Oh great, not yet-another-kernel-tree, just what the world needs..." began Greg KH, continuing, "yes, this is an announcement of a new kernel tree, linux-staging." He explained:

"In a long and meandering thread with some of the other kernel developers a week or so ago, it came up that there is no single place for companies and developers to put their code for testing while it gets cleaned up for submission into the kernel tree. All of the different subsystems have trees, but they generally only want code that is about to go into this release, or the next one. For stuff that is farther off, there is no place to go. So, here's the tree for it."

In a readme created for the new tree, Greg adds, "the linux-staging tree was created to hold drivers and filesystems and other semi-major additions to the Linux kernel that are not ready to be merged at this point in time." He also requested that the new tree be included in Linux -next, leading Theodore Ts'o to ask, "does this mean that the nature of linux-next is changing? I thought the whole point of linux-next was only to have what would be pushed to Linus in the near future, so we could check for patch compatibility issues." Greg explained that he was hoping for an exception for his new -staging tree as it only includes whole new drivers and filesystems, not changes to existng features, "there is stuff that users can use to get hardware to work that currently is not supported on kernel.org kernels at all." As an example he noted, "there are 2 big network drivers in there that support a wide range of devices that some people would like to see working :)"