The Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit organization that keeps Linus Torvalds behind the keyboard and provides services like the Linux Standards Base and Linux Legal Defense Fund — made the results of the Foundation's annual Technical Advisory Board election official on Tuesday, announcing the election of six new members from the Linux kernel developer community.

The announcement from the Foundation was, practically speaking, more a formality than a revelation, as the results of the election — held during the Linux Kernel Summit in September — have been publicly available on the Summit's mailing list since shortly after being cast. Notwithstanding the lack of surprise, the election still proves worthy of announcement, having attracted more candidates than any previous TAB election, as well as garnering a record-breaking voter turnout. The latter accomplishment was likely aided by a change of locale: Rather than being held during a session of the invitation-only Kernel Summit, as in years past, the election took place during the joint Summit closing party and opening party for the larger Linux Plumber's Conference.

The new members, who will join existing members Arjan Van de Ven, Christoph Lameter, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Jonathan Corbet for two-year terms, are:

• Chris Wright, employed by Red Hat, maintainer for the LSM framework, and co-maintainer of the -stable Linux kernel tree.
• Dave Jones, maintainer of the Fedora kernel at Red Hat.
• Chris Mason, Oracle Kernel development team and creator of the Btrfs file system.
• Kristen Carlson Accardi, kernel developer at Intel and contributor to the ACPI, PCI, and SATA subsystems.
• James Bottomley, Linux Kernel maintainer of the SCSI subsystem, the Linux Voyager port, and the 53c700 driver.
• Christoph Hellwig, software architect and developer in the storage software sector; elected to fill the remainder of a vacant one-year term.

The group will be involved throughout the year in the Linux Foundation's schedule of events, including the inaugural LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation's newly-minted conference aimed at the everyday user. The TAB's primary function, however, is to facilitate various programs assigned to it by the Linux Foundation Board, among which are the Linux Foundation NDA Program and the well-known Linux Foundation Fellowships, which have recognized Linux luminaries including Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, and Ted Ts’o.