Linus Torvalds the first release candidate for the Linux kernel 5.8, noting that it is expected to be the largest in terms of changes in the entire history of the project. The 5.8 branch has accepted 14,206 sets of changes, which affected approximately 20% of all files in the kernel code repository. The size of 5.8-rc1 is 61 MB, which is about 35% larger than the resulting patch from the 5.7 release. The release of Linux kernel 5.8 is expected at the end of August.
The changes affected 15,234 files, adding 1,026,178 lines of code,
removing 480,891 lines (for comparison, in the 5.7 branch, 570,560 lines of code were added, and 297,401 lines were removed). About 37% of all changes presented in 5.8 are related to device drivers, approximately 16% pertain to updates specific to hardware architectures, 10% is related to the network stack, 3% to file systems, and 4% to internal kernel subsystems.
It is noted that kernels with large patch sizes have been observed before, but the changes were usually concentrated in one subsystem or caused by the addition of a large volume of standard data (for example, in kernel 4.12, a large number of lines describing registers were added for the AMD GPU driver, and in kernel 2.6.29, a large batch of new drivers was added to the staging section).
Linux kernel 5.8 is remarkable for having many changes as such (in terms of the number of commits and added lines of code) and they are spread across different subsystems. Most of the changes concern drivers. Many changes relate to fundamental modifications and cleanup in the main subsystems, as well as the development of enhancements specific to hardware architectures. There were also automated corrections related to the adjustment of license information in the format , but these corrections are not dominant and only reflect the increased activity in development.
Source: opennet.ru
