Back in August, open-source developer Masahiro Yamada stepped down from maintaining the Kconfig and Kbuild areas of the Linux kernel. While [1]Kbuild maintainership was quickly passed on , no one immediately stepped up to maintain Kconfig as the infrastructure code for configuring the Linux kernel builds. That led to Kconfig officially being orphaned code within the kernel but now that situation has been addressed.

Nathan Chancellor and Nicolas Schier have volunteered to serve as the maintainers of the Kconfig code moving forward. It's no longer being considered an "orphan" but is now open to receiving "odd fixes" as its official status.

Chancellor wrote on [2]the patch updating the Kconfig status:

"Masahiro Yamada stepped down as Kbuild and Kconfig maintainer in commit 8d6841d5cb20 ("MAINTAINERS: hand over Kbuild maintenance"), leaving Kconfig officially orphaned and handing Kbuild over to Nicolas and myself. Since then, there have been a few simple patches to Kconfig that have ended up on the linux-kbuild mailing list without clear direction on who will take them, as they are not really sent to anybody officially, although the list is obviously watched by the Kbuild maintainers.

Make Nicolas and I official maintainers of Kconfig in "Odd Fixes" status, similiar to Kbuild, so that the subsystem has clear points of contact for contributors, even if significant contributions may not be accepted."

So this Kconfig configuration system for the kernel is now back to being formally maintained.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.17-Kbuild

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20251023-update-kconfig-maintainers-v1-1-0ebd5b4ecced@kernel.org/