27.8 million lines of code for the Linux kernel in early 2020

As of January 1, 2020, the Linux kernel gathered in the Git source tree more than 27.8 million lines (including Kconfig files, docs, etc.) divided into 66,492 files, it totaled 887,925 commits and more than 21 000 authors. The statistics on the open source operating system just delivered at the start of the year by the founder of the Phoronix site, Michael Larabel, also show that in 2019, the number of commits, that is to say of validations of modifications, was lower than in previous years. It went down to 74,754, which had not happened since 2013, notes Michael Larabel recalling that this number was established around 80,000 in 2017 and 2018. However, the number of modified lines remains in the average with approximately 3.386 million rows added and 1.696 deleted.

A zoom on the individual contributors shows that Linus Torvalds remains the most productive in number of modifications with 28,815 commits (or 3.25%) and the addition of 6.775 million lines. He is followed by David Miller, Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, who maintains the network subsystem and network drivers, with 12,212 commits (1.38%). On the corporate side, Intel and Red Hat are still the top contributors to the upstream kernel. Other statistics are delivered by Phoronix on the kernel for the past year on the development activity by month, by week (over the last semester), by year.

1.27 million lines for systemd

Phoronix also delivers statistics on systemd, the service manager for Linux (which replaced Init System V), whose Git tree contained 1,273,896 lines as of January 1, 2020. If the founder of systemd, the German Lennart Poettering, has been the most productive since the start of the project, having achieved 36% of all commits, it comes in 2nd position for the year 2019, behind developer Yu Watanabe. Last year, 305 developers actively contributed to systemd against 353 in 2018, notes Phoronix, which also delivers a series of figures on the project. Systemd is used in particular by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and Suse, but some Linux distributions do not use it.