The email workflow brought the Linux kernel to life and saw it through immense growth and into widespread popularity. However, it seems it's reaching its limits, prompting Linus Torvalds to say we need to "find ways to get away from the email patch model".

While the community is researching and arguing about alternatives, we'll take a look at just one of them – GitLab – and how it already helps some maintainers and developers in or near the kernel community to smoothly integrate testing into their workflow.

We'll talk about our use of GitLab at Red Hat's CKI, explore DRM CI, Mesa3D CI, Media-CI, and the proposal we worked on at KernelCI to introduce the standard GitLab CI pipeline into the kernel. We'll look at what they're already doing, what they can enable in the future, and which part they can play in replacing the email workflow.