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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.
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.
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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% |
| 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% |
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.
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