Linux Kernel 2021: Linus Torvalds leads sourcetree in commits | commits plummet

This past 2021 saw the Linux kernel incorporate a number of exciting kernel improvements and also introduce some new hardware support, but despite this, the number of commits and lines was lower than in previous years. Recently, the Internet made a summary of the Linux kernel Git development statistics in 2021.

According to Phoronix summary, as of December 31, 2021, when running GitStats in the Linux kernel sourcetree, you can see about 1,060,172 commits from 24,300 different authors in this repository (sourcetree currently consists of 32.2 million lines, spanning 74,300+ files).

Currently, the Linux kernel line count continues to grow at a very consistent rate, and new features and extended hardware support are continuing to reach the mainline.

Although the Linux kernel added some major features and introduced hardware support last year, it only saw 73,700 commits, down from 90,200 in 2020, 82,800 in 2019, and 80,100 in 2018 . The latest commit of 73,000 seems to be back in 2013 (the commit at that time was 70,900).

In this regard, Phoronix commented that the latest data may be due to the release of only 5 major kernel versions in 2021, compared with 6 in some previous years. At the same time, the additional merge window has also resulted in a slew of new commits, as well as the planned release of Linux 5.16 in the next few weeks and the launch of the Linux 5.17 merge window in January.

In addition, we also see 3.2 million lines added and 1.3 million lines removed to the Linux kernel in 2021, which is also lower than in 2020 (4 million lines added, 1.5 million lines removed).

As in previous years, Linus Torvalds is the most prolific committer on sourcetree. The next top five committers for the Linux kernel source tree are typically David S. Miller, Arnd Bergmann, Christoph Hellwig, Lee Jones, and Jakub Kicinski, longtime outstanding kernel contributors.

In 2021, there are also 4421 different emails related to Linux kernel commits, which is also down from 4603 in 2020 and 4383 in 2019.