‘Biggest Ever’ Linux 4.2-rc1 Has 1 Million New Lines Of Code

Linux 4.2-rc1 is the largest release candidate of the open source platform ever made available in terms of new code, with more than a million new lines added and more than a quarter of a million removed.

Founder Linus Torvalds said the unusually large number of changes was due to a single source, that being new AMD GPU register headers.

Linux 4.2-rc1

“In fact, just those register descriptor headers alone are about 41 percent of the entire patch,” he wrote, explaining the previous largest release was 3.11-rc1 . “The rest of the new AMD GPU driver itself is another 8 percent of the total, so we’re in the somewhat odd situation where a single driver is about half of the whole rc1 in number of lines.”

“Aside from that unusual anomaly, the rest looks fairly normal – mainly drivers and architecture updates,” he added, noting file system changes, networking, crypto, tools and testing changes were all included, but added there was another unusual element to the release.

“Interestingly, there was quite a bit of low-level x86 changes: both source code re-organization for x86 entry code and lots of FPU handling cleanups. That’s fairly unusual, with low-level x86 code being fairly stable and seldom seeing those kinds of big changes.”

Linux 4.0 went live in April, the first major number change for the platform since Linux 3.0 debuted in 2011.

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