The Linux community now has a succession plan for when Linus Torvalds checks out, after an apparently uplifting discussion about 'our eventual march toward death'

The Linux Foundation now has a succession plan for the day when Linux creator and main man Linus Torvalds either retires, or is no longer with us. The initiative came out of the Maintainers Summit held in December 2025, which ended with a session on continuity planning.

One thing I'll say about Linux people: they know how to get things done. This session resulted in broad agreement among the group about what a succession plan should look like, and an explicit plan for what to do next (which has now started).

A brief explainer of Torvalds' importance before we get into things. The Linux kernel development project has over 100 programmers each working to maintain and incorporate changes in their own repositories. But the final step in any Linux release is where all of this work is centralised and incorporated into the mainline repository: this has on almost every occasion been done by Torvalds.

The succession session was led by Dan Williams, principal engineer at Intel and Linux kernel maintainer, who got right into things by describing it as an uplifting subject linked to "our eventual march toward death," before offering to change the topic to Link tags if folk got upset. Williams noted that there has been a concern in the Linux community about what would happen if something unfortunate were to befall Torvalds, who is still a relatively spry 56 years old, with no succession plan in place.

The room discussed various options but, per LWN.net, "it is sufficient to say that there was not a lot of disagreement" before two things were agreed upon. The first was acknowledging that there are already some provisions in place, with multiple people being able to commit to Torvalds' repository, and redundancy measures in place for the stable repository.

The hoped-for scenario is that Torvalds will decide to step back, arrange a smooth transition to any replacement himself, and go off to enjoy a long retirement. Torvalds made it known he has no plans in this direction anytime soon, but why would he.

Then the big question: what if something goes wrong that does prevent this smooth transition, whether it's a freak skydiving incident or Bill Gates in the library with a candlestick. "As I put it in the discussion," writes LWN.net co-founder Jonathan Corbet, "in the absence of an agreed-upon process, the community would find itself playing Calvinball at an awkward time."

Williams made a proposal that met with wide acceptance, perhaps unsurprisingly: should the worst happen, then attendees from the most recent Maintainers Summit would come together to make a collective decision on what happens next. That may well involve, per Corbet, another "benevolent dictator" in the Torvalds mode, or a move to a group management model of some kind.

We have kernel maintainer Dave Airlie to thank for the name of that collective decision-making process: Airlie suggested the group should be locked in a room and send out a puff of white smoke when the decision is reached. Channelling that Papal energy, the documentation is named Conclave.rst.

It was agreed Williams would write the whole thing up in a process document, which he has now done: The Linux Kernel Continuity Document. I'll reproduce the basic guidelines below, where "$ORGANIZER" refers to the last Maintainer Summit organizer and "TAB" refers to the Linux Technical Advisory Board.

• Within 72 hours, $ORGANIZER will open a discussion with the invitees of the most recently concluded Maintainers Summit. A meeting of those invitees and the TAB, either online or in-person, will be set as soon as possible in a way that maximizes the number of people who can participate.
• If there has been no Maintainers Summit in the last 15 months, the set of invitees for this meeting will be determined by the TAB.
• The invitees to this meeting may bring in other maintainers as needed.
• This meeting, chaired by $ORGANIZER, will consider options for the ongoing management of the top-level kernel repository consistent with the expectation that it maximizes the long term health of the project and its community.
• Within two weeks, a representative of this group will communicate to the broader community, using the ksummit@lists.linux.dev mailing list, what the next steps will be.

The Linux Foundation will be responsible for implementing the plan. And there you have it: after this, I think we can officially designate Linus Torvalds as sacral. All humour aside, and acknowledging that Torvalds is middle-aged and hopefully has a good few decades in him yet, Linux is now simply too important for this kind of question to have been left unanswered.

Linux is now the most widely used operating system in the world: almost every server runs on it, every Android phone is running it, and even the world's supercomputers depend on it. One day Torvalds will be gone: but for many decades, perhaps even centuries, the world's infrastructure will march to the beat of his foundational genius, and the winning principle of open source.