The Linux Kernel Hit A Decade Low In 2024 For The Number Of New Commits Per Year

With New Year’s Eve at Phoronix it means combing through Git statistics for the past year of various open-source projects among other end of year coverage… The most surprising takeaway from today’s end of year exploration was seeing the Linux kernel hitting a decade low for the number of new commits this year. But not all is bad as on a line count the annual metric is comparable to more recent years.

Running GitStats on the Linux Git source tree as of this morning noted 1,324,647 commits to the Git tree from around 29,380 different authors… The Git tree with the source code, header files, documentation, Kconfig, utilities, and other assets the Git tree comes in at 87,235 files made up of 39,816,411 lines across code and other text.

Most surprising was seeing much fewer commits this year than in years going back to 2013. This year was 75,314 commits to the kernel compared to 87,993 commits last year, 86,790 commits the year before, etc. It’s typically been 80~90k commits per year since 2017 but now falling to 75k this year. Back in 2014~2016 was the mid 70k commits per year. At first I was thinking perhaps the alignment of the merge windows / kernel release cadence to the calendar year played a role but didn’t appear to when comparing the number of kernel releases per year and not something that would shift for a decade of activity.

But the commit count is just one metric and this year saw 3,694,098 new lines of code and 1,490,601 lines of code removed. That’s comparable to prior years with last year seeing 3.3 million new lines and 1.59 million lines removed… Down from the 5.3 million new lines in 2022 but for 2021 was also in the 3.2 million new line range. So in terms of code activity, 2024 was largely similar to prior years for the Linux kernel, just with far fewer commits.

With managing all of the merges to the mainline kernel as well as numerous patches of his own, Linus Torvalds remained in the top spot with 2,877 commits to the kernel this year… Again mostly from merges. That was followed by Krzysztof Kozlowski (Linaro), Jakub Kicinski (Meta), Kent Overstreet (Bcachefs), Arnd Bergmann (Linaro), and Andy Shevchenko (Intel) for the developers with the most commits this year.

There were about 4,807 authors to the Linux kernel in 2024… Down slightly from 4,861 last year and 4,909 in 2022.

The line count within the Linux kernel source tree continues to grow and in 2025 is expected to cross 40 million lines between code, documentation, and other contained text sources within the kernel tree.

Those wanting to dig through this end of year 2024 GitStats dump for the Linux kernel source tree can find the data here.