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Linux Kernel Development: How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It [2012]

By 04/01/20128月 16th, 2017Events

This is the fourth update of the annual report on Linux kernel development. It covers development through the 3.2 release, with an emphasis on the releases 2.6.36 to 3.2. It was a busy period, with seven kernel releases created, many significant changes made, and continual growth of the kernel developer and user community.

Some of the highlights include:
• Almost 92,000 changesets were merged from 3,738 individual developers representing 536 corporations.
• A vast array of important new features were merged into the mainline. These include full tickless operation, user namespaces, KVM and Xen virtualization for ARM, per-entity load tracking in the scheduler, user-space checkpoint/restart, 64-bit ARM architecture support, the F2FS flash-oriented filesystem, many networking improvements aimed at the latency and bufferbloat problems, two independent subsystems providing fast caching for block storage devices, and much more.
• A longstanding squabble over Android-specific kernel features faded completely into the background. The much discussed “wakelocks” feature was quietly replaced by a different mainline solution used in the latest Android devices.
• Much more.

Download the full report:

The Linux Foundation
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