Linux founder Linus Torvalds has just pushed out the first Linux 2.6.34 kernel release candidate and he’s included some big stats as part of the announcement.
According to Torvalds, the 2.6.34 kernel even in its rc1 stage has 400,000 new lines of code. That’s a staggering number isn’t it?
But wait it gets better, Torvalds noted that approximately 175,000 lines of code were deleted too. Over half of the changes were in drivers and approximately 850 developers contributed.
I’ve seen and reported on the Linux Foundation’s studies on who writes Linux which provide broad summaries, but generally I don’t notice those sorts of stats in Torvalds’ kernel RC notices.
To be precise the numbers for 2.6.34-rc1 are actually a bit behind other kernels. For example, the 2.6.30 Linux kernel release had 1,150 developers contribute (but that was for the final release).
