The Linux Foundation will be hosting a live interview with LWN co-founder Jonathan Corbet. The event will take place on Tuesday, June 2 at 8:00AM Pacific daylight time (UTC-7). Registration is open for those who would like to attend.

I recently presented a brief tribute to Andrew Morton at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit; it included a suggestion that reading (or re-reading) his 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium keynote would be instructive. This talk, given immediately after the Kernel Summit session that decided to fundamentally change the kernel's development model, tells a lot about how the kernel project got to where it is today. The text of that speech was hosted on Groklaw, and has since been replaced by crypto spam, which is rather less useful. In the hopes of preserving this seminal moment, the transcript has been rescued thanks to the Wayback Machine and is presented here.

The mapcount field was created to track the number of mappings (page-table entries) that refer to the given page. Among other things, a mapcount of zero means that the page has no references and can be reclaimed. Maintaining mapcount has become increasingly challenging and expensive as the memory-management system has grown in complexity, so Hildenbrand has been looking for ways to get rid of it. This session was, he said, maybe one of the last times he will have to bring up this topic.