Phoronix picks up on the latest Linux kernal release and takes a look at how much it has changed in 2016. Linux 4.10-rc1 Gained 488k Lines, Kernel Up 1.9+ Million Lines For 2016.
For those wondering how much weight the kernel gained in 2016, comparing the 4.10-rc1 kernel to 4.4-rc8 (released on 3 January 2016, basically the start of the year) the kernel tacked on nearly two million lines — of code, documentation, and other changes. For 2016 we’re at 33,286 files changed in the kernel tree yielding 4,168,283 insertions and 2,195,354 deletions.
As of this morning it puts the overall kernel tree at 57,202 files consisting of 22,833,860 lines. Keep in mind that’s not just 22.8M lines of pure code but also code comments, documentation, the in-tree tools, Kconfig, etc. But by any measure, the Linux kernel remains a huge and only growing project.
The Git tree history overall shows a total of 647,845 commits from 16,255 authors. For 2016 we are at 72,828 commits this year, down from last year’s 75,631 commits or the 75,613 commits in 2014.
22 million lines of stuff is a lot of computer program. 2/3 of a million “commits” or developer contributions indicates that there are lot of volunteers actively ingaged in the project. This is the 25th year for the project and it has become a phenomena with many paradigms.