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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 16 2020, @02:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the whole-lotta-changes-coming dept.

Bigger than big: Linux kernel colonel Torvalds claims 5.8 is 'one of our biggest releases of all time':

All going well, the stable release should appear sometime in August.

Introducing the release candidate, Torvalds said it was "right up there with v4.9, which has long been our biggest release by quite a bit in number of commits." That said, the 4.9 kernel was "artificially big" because of a couple of special factors, whereas 5.8 is a "more comprehensive release."

Torvalds said: "The development is really all over the place: there's tons of fairly fundamental core work and cleanups, but there is also lots of filesystem work and obviously all the usual driver updates too. Plus documentation and architecture work." He added: "We have modified about 20 per cent of all the files in the kernel source repository. That's really a fairly big percentage, and while some of it _is_ scripted, on the whole it's really just the same pattern: 5.8 has simply seen a lot of development."

While the code for the kernel is large, only a small part of it ends up in any individual system, since the kernel source contains code for every chip architecture and hardware it supports. In early 2018, maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman said that "an average laptop uses around 2 million lines of kernel from 5,000 files to function properly." At the time, there were 25 million lines of code in the kernel, whereas now there are over 28 million.

See also: Linux 5.8 Kernel Features Include New Intel/AMD Capabilities, Security Improvements, Optimizations.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @04:26PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @04:26PM (#1008709)

    On the 'desktop' linux is not going anywhere. However, it basically has 'won'. It is pretty much the goto server OS (usually some redhat distro). At least 60% of the phones shipped have a kernel in it. The busybox distro is probably one of the most used distros out there being the core of most IoT devices. Only maybe minux has beat them all. But only because Intel made it the core of their secure environment that is on every desktop/latop/server computer out there.

    For desktop work just use windows or mac. They are designed for it and at one point had teams that took it seriously (not so sure about MS anymore). You can use a linux distro if you want. They are quite usable. However, linux is an embedded server product whither we like it or not. However, I find most of the tools are better in windows/mac. In linux they are 'sort of' mostly usable. In some ways those tools are better. But in some instances they are much worse. But that is what is pretty awesome about this. I can pick the tools I like. You know freedom. Locking myself to one platform would be the opposite of that. I can decided to use linux for one task and windows for another and mac for another. It is kind of cool.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @03:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @03:57AM (#1009015)

    ...front.

    Go look at the most recent code submissions on minix3.org. The mailing lists too.

    Intel may be using Minix in its Management Engine cores, but if you look at contributions or funding back, there is zilch.

    Minix, outside of proprietary and toy usage is effectively dead. Tanenbaum might've been right about micro versus monolithic kernels, but he was dead wrong about licenses though. GPL or it will never be shared, unless it's a convenient way to cut maint. costs without impacting security. Since the ME IS security, nothing cost-wise will be released back, or even acknowledged.