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Who's writing Linux?

The Linux kernel project's "git" revision control tool offers up some numbers on which developers, and which companies, contributed the most code to Linux, and who's reviewing other people's code.
By Jonathan Corbet, LinuxWorld.com
September 20, 2007 01:26 PM ET
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While the kernel 2.6.23 development cycle has not yet run its course, things are getting close enough to the end that it makes sense to start looking at the overall statistics for this release. As of this writing (shortly after 2.6.23-rc6 came out), just over 6,200 non-merge changesets had been added to the mainline kernel repository. These changesets came from 854 developers - a slightly smaller number than we saw for 2.6.22. Just over 350 of those developers contributed one single changeset.

All told, the patches added almost 430,000 lines, but also removed 406,000 lines, meaning that the kernel grew by just under 23,000 lines - a relatively small number. That is partially a result of kernel hatcheteer Adrian Bunk's work: he removed the old SpeedStep code, a number of Open Sound System drivers, Rise CPU support, and more - a total of almost 73,000 lines removed. Jeff Garzik hacked out over 41,000 lines of network driver code, and Jens Axboe got rid of over 25,000 lines of code, mostly in the form of ancient CDROM drivers.

Here is the list of the top contributors to 2.6.23, as counted by changesets merged and by lines of code changed:

 

Most active 2.6.23 developers

By changesets
Ingo Molnar 152 2.5%
Ralf Baechle 119 1.9%
Trond Myklebust 116 1.9%
Paul Mundt 111 1.8%
David S. Miller 107 1.7%
Tejun Heo 103 1.7%
Al Viro 95 1.5%
Patrick McHardy 93 1.5%
Adrian Bunk 92 1.5%
FUJITA Tomonori 91 1.5%
Avi Kivity 72 1.2%
Andrew Morton 71 1.1%
Greg Kroah-Hartman 62 1.0%
Alan Cox 58 0.9%
David Brownell 56 0.9%
Jeff Garzik 55 0.9%
Christoph Hellwig 54 0.9%
Stephen Hemminger 53 0.9%
H. Peter Anvin 52 0.8%
Jesper Juhl 52 0.8%
Click to see:
By changed lines
Adrian Bunk 73254 11.0%
Jeff Garzik 43253 6.5%
Jens Axboe 28004 4.2%
Hirokazu Takata 20399 3.1%
Yoichi Yuasa 18368 2.8%
James Smart 15626 2.4%
Jeremy Fitzhardinge 15398 2.3%
David S. Miller 14752 2.2%
Matthew Wilcox 14750 2.2%
Christoph Hellwig 14550 2.2%
Rusty Russell 9452 1.4%
Imre Deak 8925 1.3%
Dan Williams 8510 1.3%
Ralf Baechle 8345 1.3%
Doug Thompson 7310 1.1%
Yoshihiro Shimoda 6981 1.1%
Marc St-Jean 6888 1.0%
Luca Olivetti 6540 1.0%
Cyrill Gorcunov 6371 1.0%
Latchesar Ionkov 5375 0.8%
Click to see:

Ingo Molnar comes out on top of the changesets column by virtue of getting the CFS scheduler merged - then fixing it. Over half of his patches were accepted after 2.6.23-rc1 came out. Ralf Baechle and Paul Mundt both contributed many changes to architecture-specific trees, Trond Myklebust did a lot of NFS work, and, while David Miller had a number of networking patches, the bulk of his changesets were in the architecture-specific (SPARC) trees. The figures on the "by changed lines" side are dominated by code removals (as described above); Jens Axboe also did a bunch of splice work and merged the "bsg" generic SCSI driver. Hirokazu Takata did a bunch of m32r architecture work. James Smart contributed a number of Fibre Channel changes and Jeremy Fitzhardinge merged the core Xen code.

Once again, we have put some effort into associating patches with the companies that supported this work, with the results shown below. These results should always be taken as approximations; we believe that they are essentially correct, but patches do not come with Paid-for-by: headers, so a certain amount of guessing is always required.

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