The Functionally-Overloaded Linux Kernel

What is FOLK?

The FOLK project is aiming to produce a patch containing as many Linux Kernel experimental projects, bug-fixes and tweaks as humanly possible.

The idea isn't to worry about quality, bloat, or any other "detail", but rather to give developers one additional way to showcase ideas and give interested users a way to try things out without having to spend a lifetime finding what's out there, another lifetime upgrading the patch to the current kernel and a third lifetime fixing all the rejected diffs.

So what help does the project need? It needs, well, stuff. Patches and kernel projects. The more obscure, arcane and bizare, the better. Those are the ones that generally prove interesting. But any kernel project that's going to be a bug-bear to get running alongside other projects is fair-game. (Unfortunately, I've come to realise that that's most of them.)

Please note that this project is not intended to be 100% stable. The consequence of having so much code that has received so little quality testing is that the code's stability will inevitably suffer some. Hopefully not too much, but remember that there may even be cases where FOLK users will be the first people outside of the original developers to actually use the code.

Lastly, this project is not intended to be "useful". If the patches used were all in a state that was complete enough to be "useful" and in widespread enough use to be "used", they'd be in the standard kernel by now. This is much closer to the "silly putty" end of things.

Where is FOLK?

Finally, there are now Debian packages of the FOLK kernels, compliments of Viral.

These are the versions of FOLK currently out there: