Lask week, the Linux Foundation announced the publication of the 2016 edition of its usual report “Linux Kernel Development – How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It”.
This report gives a nice overview of the evolution of the Linux kernel since 3.18, especially from a contribution point of view: the rate of changes, who is contributing, are there new developers joining, etc.
Bootlin is mentioned in several places in this report. First of all, even though Bootlin is a consulting company, it is shown individually rather than part of the general “consultants” category. As the report explains:
The category “consultants” represents developers who contribute to the kernel as a work-for-hire effort from different companies. Some consultant companies, such as Bootlin and Pengutronix, are shown individually as their contributions are a significant number.
Thanks to being mentioned separately from the “consultants” category, the report also shows that:
- Bootlin is the #15 contributing company over the 3.19 to 4.7 development period, in number of commits. Bootlin contributed a total of 1453 commits, corresponding to 1.3% of the total commits
- Bootlin is ranked #13 in the list of companies by number of Signed-off-by from developers who are not the author of patches. This happens because 6 of our engineers are maintainers or co-maintainers from various areas in the kernel: they merge patches from contributors, sign-off on them, and send them to another maintainer (either arm-soc maintainers or directly Linus Torvalds, depending on the subsystem).
We’re glad to see Bootlin mentioned in this report, which shows that we are a strong contributor to the official Linux kernel. Thanks to this contribution effort, we have tremendous experience with adding support for new hardware in the kernel, so contact us if you want your hardware supported in the official Linux kernel!
