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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: 4, Insightful) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday June 17 2020, @12:15PM

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Wednesday June 17 2020, @12:15PM (#1009079) Journal

    I agree this is ominous.

    I think personal computing has reached a point where there should be a development-less block of hardware and software that is locked in time, like the 2015 debian 7 laptop would be perfect.

    It would have a standard set of non changing features, and piss on all incremental upgrades.

    The idea that computers need infinite upgrades, especially personal computing, is deeply flawed in my estimation.

    But nobody cares what I think I am just a nobody.

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