The Linux Kernel Gained 2.5 Million Lines Of Code, 71k Commits In 2017

Here are some numbers on the Linux kernel development trends for 2017.

Running GitStats this morning on the Linux kernel code-base, here's how the kernel tree ended:

- 2017 saw 71,552 commits to the Linux kernel tree. That added 3,911,061 lines of new code and 1,385,507 lines of code removed for a net gain of 2.5 million lines.

- In comparison, 2016 saw 76,892 commits and 2015 saw 75,770 commits... The 71k commits in 2017 is actually the lowest since 2013 when there were 70.9k commits.

- While the number of commits is noticeably lower, 2017 brought the largest net gain to the kernel code-base ever, so the size of the commits is much larger on average... But some of the things in 2017 like the AMDGPU DC addition, many AMDGPU header files, etc, account for hundreds of thousands of that net gain.

- Besides Linus Torvalds, the most prolific patch authors for 2017 in the Linux kernel were David S. Miller, Arnd Bergmann, Chris Wilson, Arvind Yadav, and Christoph Hellwig.

- Overall, simply on a domain basis, Intel continues to lead with the most contributions as an organization to the Linux kernel followed by Red Hat.

- The Linux kernel source tree is up to 62,296 files with a total line count across all these code files and other files of 25,359,556 lines.

Those wanting to dig through all of the kernel development stats in full can find them via this GitStats output.