Some 4.10 Development statistics
As of this writing, 12,811 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 4.10 development cycle. Those changes were contributed by 1,647 developers, of whom 251 made their first-ever contribution in 4.10. These numbers put this development cycle firmly in line with its predecessors:
Release Changesets Developers 4.0 10,346 1,458 4.1 11,916 1,539 4.2 13,694 1,591 4.3 11,894 1,625 4.4 13,071 1,575 4.5 12,080 1,538 4.6 13,517 1,678 4.7 12,283 1,582 4.8 13,382 1,597 4.9 16,214 1,729 4.10 12,811 1,647
The trend toward increasing numbers of changesets clearly continues, with numbers that are now routinely higher than were seen even in the 4.0 kernel, less than two years ago.
The most active developers this time around were:
Most active 4.10 developers
By changesets Mauro Carvalho Chehab 231 1.8% Chris Wilson 193 1.5% Arnd Bergmann 134 1.0% Christoph Hellwig 115 0.9% Ben Skeggs 95 0.7% Jiri Olsa 92 0.7% Geert Uytterhoeven 86 0.7% Wei Yongjun 85 0.7% Thomas Gleixner 83 0.6% Ville Syrjälä 82 0.6% Felipe Balbi 79 0.6% Javier Martinez Canillas 79 0.6% Masahiro Yamada 77 0.6% Trond Myklebust 76 0.6% Tvrtko Ursulin 76 0.6% Dan Carpenter 73 0.6% Sergio Paracuellos 73 0.6% Walt Feasel 72 0.6% Neil Armstrong 70 0.5% Eric Dumazet 67 0.5%
By changed lines Andi Kleen 83560 9.7% Tom St Denis 55590 6.4% Mauro Carvalho Chehab 44120 5.1% Edward Cree 19164 2.2% Zhi Wang 16077 1.9% Christoph Hellwig 13872 1.6% Takashi Iwai 12707 1.5% Neil Armstrong 11809 1.4% Chris Wilson 9042 1.0% Thomas Lendacky 8693 1.0% Bard Liao 8189 0.9% Tony Lindgren 8183 0.9% Jani Nikula 8059 0.9% James Smart 7655 0.9% Manish Rangankar 7470 0.9% Ard Biesheuvel 6996 0.8% Raghu Vatsavayi 6753 0.8% Ben Skeggs 6482 0.7% Sukadev Bhattiprolu 6415 0.7% Rob Clark 6017 0.7%
Mauro Carvalho Chehab is the media subsystem maintainer, and much of his work this time around was focused there. He also, however, did a lot of work in the ongoing process of converting the kernel's documentation to Sphinx and organizing it. Chris Wilson works on the Intel i915 driver, Arnd Bergmann made fixes all over the kernel tree, Christoph Hellwig contributed a lot of changes in the block and filesystem areas, and Ben Skeggs works on the Nouveau graphics driver.
In the "changed lines" column, Andi Kleen ended up at the top of the list with a bunch of work in the perf events subsystem. Tom St. Denis added a bunch of code to the amdgpu driver, Edward Cree enhanced the sfc network driver, and Zhi Wang, once again, works in the i915 driver.
These lists are often dominated by developers working in the staging tree but, this time, nobody in the top five of either list was creating staging patches. Indeed, Sergio Paracuellos is the first staging-focused developer in the left column, while no staging work features in the right column at all. The staging tree itself was busy enough, with 957 changes in 4.10, but that work was spread across 158 developers.
Work on 4.10 was supported by 218 employers that can be identified. The list of the most active employers looks pretty much like it usually does:
Most active 4.10 employers
By changesets Intel 1752 13.7% (Unknown) 1198 9.4% Red Hat 907 7.1% (None) 765 6.0% Samsung 545 4.3% Linaro 496 3.9% SUSE 471 3.7% IBM 381 3.0% (Consultant) 337 2.6% AMD 316 2.5% 306 2.4% Mellanox 297 2.3% Renesas Electronics 236 1.8% Texas Instruments 226 1.8% Huawei Technologies 202 1.6% Broadcom 199 1.6% Oracle 183 1.4% ARM 176 1.4% Linutronix 154 1.2% NXP Semiconductors 151 1.2%
By lines changed Intel 176549 20.4% AMD 74965 8.7% Samsung 57529 6.6% Red Hat 41171 4.8% (Unknown) 34748 4.0% Linaro 32670 3.8% SUSE 31570 3.6% (None) 28002 3.2% IBM 26238 3.0% (Consultant) 25744 3.0% Solarflare Comm. 20211 2.3% MediaTek 15979 1.8% Cavium 15812 1.8% Broadcom 15695 1.8% BayLibre 14597 1.7% Mellanox 12770 1.5% NXP Semiconductors 11792 1.4% NVidia 11279 1.3% Texas Instruments 10420 1.2% 8896 1.0%
Another way to look at the employer information is to see how many developers are associated with each company:
Companies with the most developers Company Devs Pct (Unknown) 349 20.5% Intel 182 10.7% (None) 103 6.1% Red Hat 96 5.6% IBM 66 3.9% 53 3.1% Mellanox 42 2.5% Linaro 40 2.4% Samsung 37 2.2% SUSE 33 1.9% Texas Instruments 28 1.6% AMD 27 1.6% Oracle 26 1.5% Code Aurora Forum 26 1.5% Huawei Technologies 25 1.5% NXP Semiconductors 22 1.3% ARM 21 1.2% Broadcom 20 1.2% Renesas Electronics 17 1.0% Rockchip 15 0.9%
Here we see that nearly 11% of the developers who contributed to the 4.10 kernel were working for Intel. Over 20% were of unknown affiliation; they contributed 9.4% of the changes merged in this cycle.
Normal practice in these summaries is to look at the "most active employers" table above and conclude that (in this case) if all of the unknowns are working on their own time, then a maximum of just over 15% of the changes in this development cycle came from volunteers. The above table paints a slightly different picture; if, once again, the unknowns are all volunteers, then nearly 27% of the community is made up of volunteers. The difference between the numbers is almost certainly explained by the unsurprising observation that developers doing kernel work for their job will be able to spend more time on that work and, as a result, be more productive.
As of this writing, there are just over 7,500 changesets in the linux-next
repository. Those changes are the beginning of what will be merged for
4.11; history suggests that this number is likely to grow significantly
between now and the opening of the 4.11 merge window. Still, it seems
clear that 4.11 is unlikely to set any new records for patch volume. For
the definitive answer, look forward to the 4.11 summary article, to be
published in 63-70 days.
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Kernel | Releases/4.10 |
Posted Feb 9, 2017 18:45 UTC (Thu)
by johannbg (guest, #65743)
[Link]
Some 4.10 Development statistics