@Sobex @SharpLimefox It's possible in some cases, not others. You can't avoid the subsystems "above" you providing your services (DRM for me) and "below" you interacting with other devices, but you can avoid "helper" subsystems and parts of them.

The DRM scheduler is a helper. The other thing I'm going to RiiR is the GPU page table management, which is currently using the IOMMU page table helpers (both because the maintainer stopped replying to my emails... and because since the original submission my needs have diverged enough from the standard code that I think it stopped making sense to reuse it and try to fight to shoehorn those features in).

@Sobex @lina IMO regardless of subsystem you'll have to endure the structural issues plaguing RFL, but a subsystem full of people willing and motivated to help should alleviate those significantly

And there's also the problem that if your interest is in a specific area of kernel dev (drm, net, whatever), you've only got so much wiggle room to avoid maintainers unwilling to help more.

Someone i talked about this with mentioned forking as well, but that comes with the human cost of maintaining the upstream source (mainline), people having to decide whether to leave the main project, stay, or invest twice as much energy, and the risk that nobody will really use your fork (Asahi Linux being the huge exception for that point lmao)