Over 14,000 commits, 1.2 million lines of code added, almost 60,000 files, and just 63 days of work. These are the main parameters that define the latest version of the Linux kernel, 4.12. Linus Torvalds himself confirmed that it is one of the biggest releases in the history of the project, and despite the relative calm, it includes some very important advances, such as initial support for Radeon RX Vega cards and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 10 series.
Linux 4.12 is now out. On July 2, Linus Torvalds announced that "there were no reasons" to delay its release, and that the release candidates had stabilized it very well. However, he also hinted that 4.12 is "big", and those who follow Linux statistics closely didn't hesitate to agree. Greg Kroah-Hartman, the lead maintainer of the kernel in the -stable (among other things), shared a small spreadsheet that helps compare Linux 4.12's numbers easily against the last five versions.
A look at the numbers
Only Linux 4.9 surpasses 4.12 in number of commits, which isn't surprising given that 4.9 is an LTS kernel. From another angle, the Linux kernel has 24,170,860 lines of code, with more than 19,000 lines added per day (and 2,600 removed in the same interval). Much of that activity is linked to new hardware support. One example that Torvalds gave was the introduction of reference files for Radeon RX Vega cards, which, by the way, are not yet available in their consumer versions. Initial support for the GeForce GTX series 10 via Nouveau, ARM64 optimizations, new audio drivers, a USB Type-C port manager, power management tweaks, and Intel Atomic enabled by default are part of the list.
In summary, an impressive job. Next on the calendar is Linux 4.13, but all guns point to Linux 4.14, which if I'm not mistaken will be the next LTS.
