Forty-three million lines of code is quite a bit. I would say that over the span of my 30 years as a writer, I may have written that many words … may being the operative term.

The Linux kernel has been slowly inching toward that number, and who knows what count the next release will bring. Given that the codebase has seen the removal of several old drivers, the fact that the line count has climbed says a lot. Two of the drivers that were removed are the RC Systems DoubleTalk PC ISA speech synthesizer driver, which was first released in 1991. The second removal was the PROFIBUS driver that was originally ported from SCO Unix in 1998. Nobody was using the code, so out both drivers go.

You might find it surprising that the AMDGPU controller is the largest component in the core, with nearly 6.4 million lines of code, but the size of the codebase isn't nearly as important as what's in it.

Linux 7.2 includes dramatic performance improvements that come by way of improved memory management and network latency changes, changes that are due to optimizations in internal APIs. As well, there's a PCIe fix that resolves a 2023 regression regarding hot-plugged devices that could get permanently set at 2.5 GT/s speeds; a strncpy API has been totally eliminated; the integration of the Rust language received more updates, with the goal of bringing memory-safe code deeper into the kernel subsystems; the Btrfs, ext4, and F2FS filesystems were improved, memory management now has better performance on high-load systems, and the sched_ext code was restructured.

Important to note, AI's role with the Linux kernel continues by helping to bolster security tools and improving the review rate for Arm architectures.