Development statistics for 6.14
This kernel release included contributions from 1,897 developers; that, too, is a relatively small number — though rather larger than the 1,457 who participated in the 4.0 release. One only needs to go back to 5.15, released in 2021, to find a kernel release made with the participation of fewer developers. Of the developers contributing to 6.14, 228 were first-time contributors.
The most active developers this time around were:
Most active 6.14 developers
By changesets Kent Overstreet 275 2.5% Thomas Weißschuh 183 1.7% Jani Nikula 123 1.1% Sean Christopherson 120 1.1% Dmitry Baryshkov 106 1.0% Krzysztof Kozlowski 105 1.0% David Howells 97 0.9% Russell King 94 0.9% Darrick J. Wong 93 0.8% Jakub Kicinski 91 0.8% Christoph Hellwig 84 0.8% Dr. David Alan Gilbert 80 0.7% Eric Biggers 72 0.7% Mario Limonciello 68 0.6% Eric Dumazet 67 0.6% Christian Brauner 66 0.6% SeongJae Park 60 0.5% Steven Rostedt 58 0.5% Claudiu Beznea 58 0.5% Ian Rogers 57 0.5%
By changed lines Richard Fitzgerald 17946 3.5% Darrick J. Wong 10807 2.1% Eric Biggers 10622 2.1% Karan Tilak Kumar 10174 2.0% Lizhi Hou 9252 1.8% Kent Overstreet 9075 1.8% David Howells 8366 1.6% Taniya Das 7181 1.4% Dmitry Baryshkov 6827 1.3% Patrick Rudolph 6089 1.2% Charlie Jenkins 5961 1.2% Even Xu 5169 1.0% Jani Nikula 4965 1.0% Melody Olvera 4841 0.9% Jie Gan 4781 0.9% Krzysztof Kozlowski 4769 0.9% Nuno Das Neves 4579 0.9% Piotr Kwapulinski 4460 0.9% SeongJae Park 4306 0.8% Lukas Bulwahn 4256 0.8%
The developer with the most changesets this time around is Kent Overstreet, who merged the usual set of fixes and improvements to the bcachefs filesystem; that count was increased by the fact that Overstreet missed the 6.13 development cycle. Thomas Weißschuh contributed fixes and hardening patches throughout the kernel. Jani Nikula worked extensively on the Intel i915 GPU driver, Sean Christopherson continued a long-running series of KVM improvements, and Dmitry Baryshkov contributed a set of graphics and devicetree changes.
Looking at the "lines changed" column, Richard Fitzgerald added a set of unit tests for the Cirrus firmware drivers. Darrick Wong added a long list of improvements to the XFS filesystem. Eric Biggers did some extensive refactoring in the crypto subsystem and removed some unused drivers. Karan Tilak Kumar contributed extensively to the Cisco FNIC driver, and Lizhi Hou added a new driver for the AMD "amdxdna" AI engine.
The percentages of patches with Reviewed-by tags dropped a little from 6.13 (to 49.2%) in this release, but the number with Tested-by tags increased to 9.3%. The top reviewers and testers this time around were:
Test and review credits in 6.14
Tested-by Daniel Wheeler 113 9.6% Mark Pearson 65 5.5% Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo 40 3.4% Sergey Senozhatsky 24 2.0% Aaron Ma 22 1.9% Rui Zhang 21 1.8% Manivannan Sadhasivam 18 1.5% Fuad Tabba 18 1.5% Choong Yong Liang 18 1.5% James Clark 17 1.4% Rick Wertenbroek 16 1.4% Dirk Behme 16 1.4% Johan Hovold 15 1.3% Antony Antony 15 1.3%
Reviewed-by Christoph Hellwig 185 2.5% Ilpo Järvinen 152 2.1% Dmitry Baryshkov 134 1.8% Konrad Dybcio 124 1.7% Krzysztof Kozlowski 121 1.6% Jeff Layton 117 1.6% Andrew Lunn 113 1.5% Simon Horman 112 1.5% Geert Uytterhoeven 108 1.5% AngeloGioacchino Del Regno 104 1.4% Mario Limonciello 83 1.1% Mark Pearson 71 1.0% Johannes Thumshirn 69 0.9% Jani Nikula 68 0.9%
Daniel Wheeler has been the top credited tester for every kernel release since 6.3; if one discounts a disappointing second-place finish in 6.2, though, he has actually held that position since the 5.12 release in 2021. Christoph Hellwig routinely shows up at the top of the Reviewed-by column. Curious LWN subscribers can learn more about the review, test, and bug-reporting credits for this release on this KSDB page.
Work on 6.14 was supported by 220 employers that we know of — a few more than contributed to 6.13. The most active employers supporting 6.14 were:
Most active 6.14 employers
By changesets Intel 1177 10.7% (Unknown) 1049 9.5% 959 8.7% (None) 658 6.0% Red Hat 620 5.6% AMD 583 5.3% Linaro 471 4.3% Qualcomm 465 4.2% Meta 346 3.1% Oracle 327 3.0% SUSE 231 2.1% Renesas Electronics 221 2.0% IBM 213 1.9% NVIDIA 208 1.9% Huawei Technologies 187 1.7% (Consultant) 185 1.7% Amadeus IT GmbH 167 1.5% NXP Semiconductors 155 1.4% Microsoft 153 1.4% Arm 139 1.3%
By lines changed Intel 46050 8.9% 44221 8.6% (Unknown) 43909 8.5% Qualcomm 43055 8.4% AMD 37831 7.3% Red Hat 30166 5.9% (None) 25576 5.0% Cirrus Logic 18639 3.6% Linaro 18412 3.6% Oracle 15375 3.0% Meta 14161 2.7% Cisco 10296 2.0% Microsoft 9719 1.9% NVIDIA 9452 1.8% Bootlin 7888 1.5% Microchip Technology Inc. 7534 1.5% IBM 6872 1.3% NXP Semiconductors 6770 1.3% 9Elements 6099 1.2% Rivos 6007 1.2%
As usual, there are few surprises here. It is worth noting that contributions from developers working on their own time (and those with unknown employers, many of whom will also be volunteers) is up slightly over 6.13. That may be normal variation, but it may also reflect the holidays, where volunteers may have found more time to write patches while developers working on the kernel as their job took time off.
Whether the holidays are the real reason for the relative slowness of 6.14
is not entirely clear, though. As of this writing, there are just over
12,100 non-merge changesets sitting in linux-next, most of which will
be destined for the 6.15 kernel. That number exceeds the approximately
9,000 that were staged for 6.14 by a significant margin, suggesting that
6.15 will be a busier release, more in line with recent history.
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Kernel | Releases/6.14 |