Linux contributor base broadens

With more companies funding Linux work, the core hackers now delegate 70% of the coding

By Don Marti, LinuxWorld.com, 06/28/07

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As the number of Linux kernel contributors continues to grow, core developers are finding themselves mostly managing and checking, not coding, said Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of USB and PCI support in Linux and co-author of Linux Device Drivers, in a talk at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa Thursday.

In the latest kernel release, the most active 30 developers authored only 30% of the changes, while two years ago, the top 20 developers did 80% of the changes, he said. Kroah-Hartman himself is now doing more code reviewing than coding. "That's all I do, is read patches these days," he said.

In theory, the kernel development process would involve changes, or patches, moving from the original author through a file or driver maintainer, to the maintainer of a major subsystem such as PCI or SCSI, to Andrew Morton for testing and finally to Linus Torvalds for a kernel release. But, Kroah-Hartman said, "I tried graphing that. That's not what happens. It's a mess. There's routing all over the place."

A graph of all the developers involved in the upcoming 2.6.22 release, and the relationships of who reviewed whose patches, extends to a 40-foot-long printout with names in tiny type. The graph is on display at the Ottawa event.

The new "mess" results in innovative new features getting integrated into Linux distributions much more quickly, says Jonathan Corbet, author of the camera driver for One Laptop Per Child and another co-author of Linux Device Drivers. Previously, when developers maintained both "stable" and "development" kernels, it could have been two to three years before a feature made it from development to mainstream users.

Today, by contrast, the newly released Fedora 7 distribution has the power-saving tickless kernel functionality, which came out in the 2.6.21 kernel in April.

Enterprise Linux distributions that pick a single kernel.org release and maintain it for five to seven years are another reason for the "mess." Instead of waiting for a stable upstream release and then modifying it to include new functionality from development kernels, an enterprise distribution can QA and support any of the 2.6 releases, which come out every 2.5 months. "The patch loads carried by the distributors have shrunk quite a bit," Corbet said.

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