Some development statistics for 6.2
The work in 6.2 was contributed by 2,088 developers, which just barely sets a new record; the previous record was the 2,086 developers contributed to 5.19. Of those developers, 294 made their first contribution to the kernel in this cycle, a fairly typical number. The most active contributors to the 6.2 release were:
Most active 6.2 developers
By changesets Uwe Kleine-König 571 3.7% Krzysztof Kozlowski 342 2.2% Johan Hovold 178 1.1% Andy Shevchenko 152 1.0% Thomas Gleixner 148 1.0% Ville Syrjälä 147 0.9% Yang Yingliang 141 0.9% Ben Skeggs 128 0.8% Christoph Hellwig 126 0.8% Dmitry Baryshkov 120 0.8% Namhyung Kim 117 0.8% Sean Christopherson 112 0.7% Colin Ian King 103 0.7% David Howells 99 0.6% Martin Kaiser 97 0.6% Ian Rogers 96 0.6% Josef Bacik 94 0.6% Hans de Goede 93 0.6% Dmitry Torokhov 80 0.5% Thomas Zimmermann 77 0.5%
By changed lines Ian Rogers 149899 17.0% Ping-Ke Shih 31997 3.6% Ben Skeggs 23004 2.6% Steen Hegelund 17222 2.0% Arnd Bergmann 13042 1.5% Shayne Chen 12476 1.4% Jason Gunthorpe 11480 1.3% Krzysztof Kozlowski 11365 1.3% Eugen Hristev 10452 1.2% David Howells 9020 1.0% Dmitry Baryshkov 7981 0.9% Daniel Almeida 7654 0.9% Nick Terrell 6984 0.8% Carlos Bilbao 6817 0.8% Paul Kocialkowski 6487 0.7% Josef Bacik 6219 0.7% Johan Hovold 5726 0.6% Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi 5615 0.6% Tianjia Zhang 5531 0.6% Horatiu Vultur 5488 0.6%
Uwe Kleine-König contributed the most changesets this time around; this work was dominated by the conversion of a vast number of drivers to a new I2C API. Krzysztof Kozlowski continues to work on updating and improving devicetree files. Johan Hovold worked mostly with a set of Qualcomm PHY drivers, Andy Shevchenko performed cleanups across the driver tree, and Thomas Gleixner worked extensively in the core-kernel and x86 subsystems.
Usually, when a developer lands at the top of the "lines changed" column, it is the result of adding more machine-generated amdgpu header files. This time, though, Ian Rogers got there by working with the perf tool and, in particular, updating a number of Intel PMU event definition files. Ping-Ke Shih contributed a number of improvements to the rtw89 wireless network adapter driver. Ben Skeggs worked, as always, on the Nouveau graphics driver, Steen Hegelund worked on the sparx5 network driver, and Arnd Bergmann deleted a number of unmaintained drivers.
The top testers and reviewers this time around were:
Test and review credits in 6.2
Tested-by Philipp Hortmann 154 11.2% Daniel Wheeler 94 6.8% Mark Broadworth 51 3.7% Gurucharan G 39 2.8% Yang Lixiao 33 2.4% Matthew Rosato 27 2.0% Vincent Donnefort 26 1.9% Yi Liu 25 1.8% Nicolin Chen 24 1.7% Steev Klimaszewski 24 1.7% Yu He 22 1.6% Daniel Golle 20 1.5% Naveen N. Rao 16 1.2% Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo 16 1.2% Guenter Roeck 15 1.1%
Reviewed-by Andy Shevchenko 271 3.1% Krzysztof Kozlowski 249 2.8% Rob Herring 231 2.6% Konrad Dybcio 196 2.2% Dmitry Baryshkov 174 2.0% AngeloGioacchino Del Regno 127 1.4% Lyude Paul 125 1.4% Kevin Tian 118 1.3% David Sterba 114 1.3% Ranjani Sridharan 108 1.2% Jason Gunthorpe 98 1.1% Hans de Goede 97 1.1% Jani Nikula 93 1.1% Chaitanya Kulkarni 89 1.0% Peter Ujfalusi 82 0.9%
Philipp Hortmann's testing was almost entirely limited to Realtek wireless driver changes. Daniel Wheeler continues to test graphics patches from within AMD; Mark Broadworth did the same. In the reviews column, Andy Shevchenko reviewed patches across the driver tree at a rate of nearly four per day. Krzysztof Kozlowski, Rob Herring, and Konrad Dybcio all reviewed devicetree patches at almost the same rate.
All told, 1,161 commits in 6.2 (7.4%) had Tested-by tags, while 6,735 commits (43.4%) had Reviewed-by tags. A quick look shows that the use of Reviewed-by tags has been steadily growing over the years:
Commits with Reviewed-by tags in each release Release Total Tagged % v4.0 10,346 1,712 16.5% v4.1 11,916 1,666 14.0% v4.2 13,694 2,316 16.9% v4.3 12,274 2,174 17.7% v4.4 13,071 2,434 18.6% v4.5 12,080 2,355 19.5% v4.6 13,517 2,785 20.6% v4.7 12,283 2,749 22.4% v4.8 13,382 2,965 22.2% v4.9 16,214 4,073 25.1% v4.10 13,029 2,972 22.8% v4.11 12,724 3,126 24.6% v4.12 14,570 3,977 27.3% v4.13 13,006 3,272 25.2% v4.14 13,452 3,144 23.4% v4.15 14,866 4,970 33.4% v4.16 13,630 3,902 28.6% v4.17 13,541 3,978 29.4% v4.18 13,283 4,040 30.4% v4.19 14,043 4,171 29.7% v4.20 13,884 4,201 30.3% v5.0 12,808 4,045 31.6% v5.1 12,749 3,843 30.1% v5.2 14,309 4,974 34.8% v5.3 14,605 4,860 33.3% v5.4 14,619 5,184 35.5% v5.5 14,350 4,939 34.4% v5.6 12,665 4,184 33.0% v5.7 13,901 4,797 34.5% v5.8 16,306 5,477 33.6% v5.9 14,858 5,251 35.3% v5.10 16,175 5,352 33.1% v5.11 14,340 5,038 35.1% v5.12 13,015 4,690 36.0% v5.13 16,030 5,245 32.7% v5.14 14,735 5,228 35.5% v5.15 12,377 4,361 35.2% v5.16 14,190 5,182 36.5% v5.17 13,038 4,846 37.2% v5.18 14,954 6,017 40.2% v5.19 15,134 6,361 42.0% v6.0 15,402 6,044 39.2% v6.1 13,942 5,997 43.0% v6.2 15,440 6,735 43.4%
Less than half of the non-merge commits in 6.2 contain Reviewed-by tags, but the percentage of such tags is still nearly triple what it was for the 4.0 release, almost eight years ago.
A total of 235 employers supported work on 6.2, a fairly normal sort of number. The most active employers this time were:
Most active 6.2 employers
By changesets Intel 1658 10.7% (Unknown) 1125 7.2% 1119 7.2% Linaro 1118 7.2% Red Hat 1026 6.6% Huawei Technologies 858 5.5% Pengutronix 641 4.1% AMD 616 4.0% (None) 577 3.7% SUSE 457 2.9% NVIDIA 443 2.9% Meta 429 2.8% (Consultant) 323 2.1% IBM 249 1.6% Arm 240 1.5% NXP Semiconductors 237 1.5% Linutronix 221 1.4% Renesas Electronics 210 1.4% Microchip Technology Inc. 172 1.1% Oracle 166 1.1%
By lines changed 182057 20.7% Linaro 65578 7.4% Red Hat 63332 7.2% Intel 60882 6.9% (Unknown) 41141 4.7% Realtek 38961 4.4% Microchip Technology Inc. 37217 4.2% NVIDIA 33702 3.8% Meta 32152 3.6% AMD 28888 3.3% MediaTek 22373 2.5% (None) 22363 2.5% SUSE 20743 2.4% Collabora 13197 1.5% Renesas Electronics 11889 1.3% Huawei Technologies 11295 1.3% IBM 10225 1.2% (Consultant) 8988 1.0% Analog Devices 8864 1.0% NXP Semiconductors 8829 1.0%
IBM, once one of the biggest contributors to Linux, continues to slide slowly down in this ranking (Red Hat, which is owned by IBM but said to be run independently, has also declined, but less so). But, in general, this table looks as it always does, without a lot of surprises.
That reflects the state of the kernel development process as a whole; it
continues to produce kernel releases on a predictable schedule without many
surprises. As of this writing, there are over 12,000 changesets
waiting in linux-next for the 6.3 development cycle, so it looks like the
pace will not be slowing down much in the near future. However 6.3 turns
out, you'll find the results summarized here shortly thereafter.
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Kernel | Releases/6.2 |
Posted Feb 21, 2023 0:28 UTC (Tue)
by Kamiccolo (subscriber, #95159)
[Link]
Posted Feb 21, 2023 10:51 UTC (Tue)
by tpetazzoni (subscriber, #53127)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 21, 2023 14:39 UTC (Tue)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link]
The two weird typos have been fixed; the actual data was correct and has not been changed.
Posted Feb 21, 2023 17:04 UTC (Tue)
by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
[Link]
Posted Feb 21, 2023 21:05 UTC (Tue)
by calumapplepie (guest, #143655)
[Link]
Gimme a sec, I need to go buy some popcorn for when the inevitable crew of people shows up complaining about broken workflows and demanding that the drivers be restored /j. Also possibly look for a list of removed drivers to see if I should put down the popcorn and join them.
Posted Feb 22, 2023 8:12 UTC (Wed)
by jtepe (subscriber, #145026)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Feb 22, 2023 11:15 UTC (Wed)
by jonas.bonn (subscriber, #47561)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 28, 2023 19:18 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
> BitKeeper/cvsps speak for "commit". Since Git does not store changes, but states, it really does not make sense to use the term "changesets" with Git.
(I wonder if the persistence of the term here is just because Jon spent so much time reporting on Linux in the almost-forgotten BitKeeper days. On the other hand, in one month git will be old enough to vote...)
Posted Feb 22, 2023 12:37 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Changeset is jargon.
In other words, the man in the street won't have a clue, but it's used by programmers, and your typical programmer will understand it.
A lot of people moan about jargon, but at the end of the day all jargon is is an industry-specific vocabulary. You cannot expect people with a shared experience to talk about that experience using only words in widespread usage. They will use words specific to that experience, and that's what jargon is. (And it pisses me off greatly, when I use correct, accurate words and other people moan because they don't understand them and want me to explain in twenty words when one should do.)
Cheers,
Posted Feb 22, 2023 15:35 UTC (Wed)
by Nikratio (subscriber, #71966)
[Link] (4 responses)
If for a given kernel there's hundreds of new first-time contributors, what happens to them afterwards?
The overall number of contributors does not seem to be changing that much. So are the new contributors replacing older contributors, or do they never come back after the first patch?
Posted Feb 22, 2023 16:00 UTC (Wed)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (3 responses)
Meanwhile, I have at times looked at lost contributors — those who contributed to a given release for the last time. The problem is that such a signal is necessarily old; we do get people who show up every few years to fix something that bothers them. You can never really say that somebody is gone.
Posted Feb 22, 2023 16:45 UTC (Wed)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Dunno how far you want to go back, but maybe multiply the "contributors to the current kernel" by say 4, and then provide stats for the most prolific "contributed to X kernels" contributors up to that number.
Yes that will lose the "drive by" contributors, but it'll give an insight into the "now and then" contributors. Ten years is probably a good time window.
Cheers,
Posted Feb 24, 2023 9:15 UTC (Fri)
by Nikratio (subscriber, #71966)
[Link]
Another interesting thing may be to plot a histogram of current developers vs number of past kernels they have contributed to. This would tell us more about how much of the kernel comes from regular contributors vs occasional ones.
Posted Feb 27, 2023 16:46 UTC (Mon)
by sima (subscriber, #160698)
[Link]
Still a pile of scripting work to generate those numbers ...
Some development statistics for 6.2
Some development statistics for 6.2
Well, it averages to 6.2 :)
Some development statistics for 6.2
Some development statistics for 6.2
Some development statistics for 6.2
Some development statistics for 6.2
Some development statistics for 6.2
Some development statistics for 6.2
Some development statistics for 6.2
Wol
Some development statistics for 6.2
The number of contributors to each release does continue to grow.
What happens to new contributors
What happens to new contributors
Wol
What happens to new contributors
What happens to new contributors