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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 toddestan on Wednesday June 17 2020, @02:02AM (3 children)

    by toddestan (4982) on Wednesday June 17 2020, @02:02AM (#1008980)

    That's only one version back, as Windows 8/8.1 might as well not even exist now, especially in the corporate world.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 17 2020, @02:03PM (2 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday June 17 2020, @02:03PM (#1009111) Homepage Journal

    True but it's an unsupported by Microsoft version that's not being sold on new computers anymore. As soon as the last of the Win7 boxes die, I'll never have to touch another one.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by toddestan on Wednesday June 17 2020, @10:22PM (1 child)

      by toddestan (4982) on Wednesday June 17 2020, @10:22PM (#1009317)

      If you're waiting for the last of the Windows 7 boxes to die, you'll be waiting a long time. I still see Windows XP somewhat regularly.

      With that said, I expect most of them will be gone by about 3 years or so, as by then most software vendors will have pulled the plug on Windows 7 support. But that long tail can be really long...

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 18 2020, @11:56AM

        I'm not worried about corporate ones (pay me enough and I'll support your in-house Windows app running on Windows through cygwin and then wine) and none of the friends and family can go over a decade without a new computer like I can.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.