The first was about the plans for Prodkernel: will there still be the giant, two-year rebase? Hatch said that for now Icebreaker and Prodkernel would proceed in parallel. Delgadillo noted that Icebreaker is new, and has not necessarily worked out all of its kinks. He also said that while Icebreaker is meant to be functionally equivalent to Prodkernel, it may not be at parity performance-wise. It is definitely a goal to run these kernels in production, but that has not really happened yet.

Now they have two separate linux kernel projects that they have to maintain. That sounds pretty brutal. If they can’t switch over ProdKernel to use their new Icebreaker then it kind of sounds like Icebreaker is going fail.

This is an insane amount of effort. I’d like to know more about how they test their patches.