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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) by Gaaark on Tuesday June 16 2020, @04:46PM (2 children)

    by Gaaark (41) on Tuesday June 16 2020, @04:46PM (#1008726) Journal

    Windows free since 1999 (Win XP if memory serves, (SP2?)).

    Something like that...my ROM/RAM is faulty....

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
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  • (Score: 2) by engblom on Tuesday June 16 2020, @09:38PM (1 child)

    by engblom (556) on Tuesday June 16 2020, @09:38PM (#1008855)

    If you used XP with SP2 you could not have become Windows free 1999. XP became available in late 2001 and SP2 was released 2004.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @03:46AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @03:46AM (#1009010)

      Even Windows 2000 hadn't come out yet (It was still NT5 RC0 or so at that time... did it even have CD-ROM/floppy support yet?)

      Windows ME was out during that period as well. Hell the Pentium 4s didn't come out until '00 or '01, and it was another year or two before anyone was seriously buying them instead of the Pentium 3/Athlons.