Linus is the single gatekeeper of Linux.

EternalLight · on Oct 4, 2012

No, he isn't. He's the final gatekeeper but there are several of lower level gatekeepers/maintainers for different parts.

At least according to rumors, I've never invested the time to get involved myself.

dfc · on Oct 4, 2012

There are an awful lot of maintainers for smaller individual pieces/subsytems of the kernel. Take a look at the MAINTAINERS file to see who is responsible for the smaller chunks:

  grep -B1 ^M: /usr/src/linux-kernel/MAINTAINERS

jrochkind1 · on Oct 5, 2012

I've never even looked at any linux source code, but I still know there's too much of it to believe Linus reviews and signs off on every single commit personally.