Phoronix counted 19,671 Git commits in the Linux 7.4 merge window, 3,404 more than the 16,267 reported for Linux 7.3. That is about 20.9% more than Linux 7.3’s total. Phoronix described the 7.4 count as the largest in its historical comparison.
What the 19,671 commits count
A merge window is the period when changes are incorporated into a kernel release before its first release candidate. Phoronix’s count covers Git history from v7.3 to the pre-v7.4-rc1 snapshot. On November 1, 2026, Phoronix reported that Linux 7.4-rc1 had been released on schedule.
The terminal output displays git rev-list --count v7.3..master and the result 19671, alongside counts for earlier version ranges.
Linux 7.4 compared with Linux 7.3
| Linux version | Reported merge-window commits |
| Linux 7.4 | 19,671 |
| Linux 7.3 | 16,267 |
The difference is 3,404 commits, or approximately 20.9% of Linux 7.3’s total. The percentage is calculated from the two reported counts. Commit volume measures recorded development activity; it is not a measure of kernel performance or code quality.
Commits and source-tree lines measure different things
Phoronix reported 41,605,120 lines in the Linux 7.4 pre-rc1 source-tree snapshot. Its cloc breakdown classified 31,417,938 as code, 4,993,604 as comments and 5,193,578 as blank lines. These figures describe the size and composition of that snapshot, not the number of lines added during the merge window.
A separate Linux 7.3 figure of 20,260 commits covers the full v7.2-to-v7.3 cycle. That interval differs from a merge window, so it is not directly comparable with the two totals in the table.
What may have contributed to the activity
Phoronix linked some of the recent increase in activity to AI- and large-language-model-related bug reports and patches. Linus Torvalds also mentioned expectations that Linux 7.4 could become the next LTS release as a possible factor. He characterized a full third of the patch as AMD GPU register offsets and bit masks. These explanations describe possible contributors; they do not assign a share of the 19,671 commits to each one.
