"Drivers tend to be a world unto themselves, with bugs only affecting a subset--often a tiny subset--of kernel users. Until a driver gets merged into the kernel though, anyone wishing to test it, or help clean it up, has to jump through some hoops. To try and help reduce those barriers, Linus Torvalds and others have been advocating early merging of drivers; getting them into the kernel and incrementally improving them from there.
"This policy of early merging of drivers is not universally embraced, with a recent remote DMA (RDMA) ethernet driver, which lives in the infiniband tree, getting singled out..."
