

Who's Writing Linux? - tbrock
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/whos-writing-linux

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RK
For those wondering:

 _Linaro is a not-for-profit engineering organization that works on
consolidating and optimizing open-source software for the ARM architecture,
including the GCC toolchain, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, graphics
and multimedia interfaces. It was announced at Computex in June 2010 by ARM,
Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments in a
joint press conference. It also provides aligned engineering and investment in
upstream open source projects, a monthly release of tools and software and
support to silicon companies in upstreaming their system-on-a-chip (SoC)
support._

That makes sense why Linaro is the 5th biggest contributer. (I'd never heard
of them.)

~~~
rjzzleep
might have heard of them but ignored it, because it didn't resonate as much
with you.

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/android-
performance-b...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/android-performance-
boosted-30-100-percent-by-linaro-toolchain/)

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codezero
This is off topic, but their main content is a small fixed-width area, and
their related topics flow on the right. On a large monitor, this means that
the screen is dominated by related story squares, and the main story is really
hard to parse.

~~~
joshuarrrr
A Spectrum editor here- yes, we know the layout is far from ideal, especially
on large monitors (I'm painfully aware-my primary monitor is a 30-inch cinema
display). We just had a meeting about page templates for infographics last
week, so hopefully it will me much better in a couple months.

~~~
sorvalk
A couple months? Aren't things supposed to move quickly in the Internet age?

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leonroy
Surprised at how fast the LOC are increasing in Linux. Makes the possiblity of
exploits and vulnerabilities being slipped in increasingly likely.

Interesting graph I found while looking up LOC for comparable projects:
[http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million...](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-
lines-of-code/)

------
atmosx
Interesting analysis. I didn't think that by this point volunteers would have
the upper hand in %.

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mrweasel
Does Ubuntu developers count as individual contributors or does Ubuntu not
help?

~~~
JNRowe
You can see what people using canonical email addresses are contributing[1].
If you look at the changesets you can also also see the type of changes
they're upstreaming, many are simply one liners for hardware support. Hardware
support is clearly valuable, but it isn't the level of contribution some other
companies put in by any stretch.

1\.
[https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....](https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?qt=author&q=@canonical.com&ofs=50)

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jzzskijj
I have to admit I haven't been following the development as I used to. Could
someone in here say to which FS the article is referring to:

"The increasing size of the Linux kernel is due to the incorporation of
significant new features, including a file system optimized for solid-state
drives"

~~~
buster
I suppose he is talking about F2FS which is in kernel since 3.8.

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charlieflowers
How much do these types of jobs pay?

~~~
blueskin_
Red Hat, or volunteering?

~~~
charlieflowers
Red Hat, Intel, etc. -- People whose salary is earned by developing Linux.

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welder
Is there really 17 million lines of code for the linux kernel?

(from the chart at bottom)

~~~
fragmede
Approximately, yes. (looking at 3.10 because that's what the graph was looking
at for 17 million lines)

((v3.10))~/linux-2.6$ wc -l `find . -type f | grep -v [.]git ` | tail -1
16956298 total

Only 15.8M of that is C header/source + assembly,

Documentation is some ~450k.

There's about 260k lines spent for the build system and other scripts.

There's another 135k spent in other tools.

Leaving ~300k in README, TODOs and other misc files.

I'd say closer to 16 million for v3.10, including build scripts and other
tooling.

For comparison, v3.13, ~ 6 months later, has 17.9M lines of C and assembly.

~~~
cliveowen
I wonder how many of those are compiled if the target is an x86 processor.

~~~
fragmede
380280 total lines of assembly, but only 38925 lines of that are in arch/x86/
(again, v3.10), so barely a 10th of it.

~~~
mjn
There's also a bunch of stuff in drivers/ that would be excluded in a typical
x86 build, though it (mostly) isn't explicitly architecture-dependent. Over
half of the whole kernel LOC are in the drivers directory, which includes
support for all sorts of unusual devices.

~~~
fragmede
Oh good point.

I was curious so I did make allmodconfig (I'm on 64-bit x86) and 'made bzImage
modules' and counted lines of c/asm source with a corresponding .o file, all
the header files and Makefile/Kconfig lines and got:

headers: 3011226

c/asm source: 8264404

generated .mod.c: 8414151

makefile/kconfig: 2032728

total 21722509

(Again, this is v3.10) (I also included the generated .mod.c files)
[https://gist.github.com/fragmede/8782876](https://gist.github.com/fragmede/8782876)

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NDizzle
Neckbeards.

