Oracle is the #1 contributor to the core of Linux in 5.18*

A number of years ago, when the Linux 4.20 kernel was released Jon Corbet made the observation on LWN that "there are many companies that find it in their interest to support work on the Linux kernel, but rather fewer of them put resources into the core code that everybody uses." At that time, Oracle was number three on that list, behind Red Hat and SuSE. By that metric in the 5.18 release of the Linux kernel, Oracle is the #1 contributor to the "core" of the kernel, in terms of number of changesets.

This observation came up in the regular series on LWN.net that follow each new Linux kernel release, and defined this metric for "core kernel" as "patches touching core kernel code (loosely defined as the contents of fs, kernel and mm directory trees)". One of the things I've always appreciated about the LWN Development Statistics series is the attempt to always look at kernel development statistics from a new perspective in order to discern from that the health of the development community around Linux. Other past spotlights include the critical work of kernel maintainers, reviewers, and the folks reporting and fixing bugs. The "core kernel" metric in particular caught my attention because our developers often work on that type of architecture-independent, non-driver code: the "code that everybody uses." And since 4.20, Oracle has consistently come in second or third by that metric in every kernel -- until now.

Counting commits or lines of code changed is a crude approximation of the activities of developers and is not a metric we look at every day, but it does serve as a reminder that the efforts of our developers and maintainers result in code that runs on every Linux box everywhere.

Our focus continues to helping Linux run well on large server hardware without sacrificing performance on handheld and IoT devices. A large part of this burst in contributions came from Matthew Wilcox's large patchset establishing Page Folios; also arriving in 5.18 were a number of XFS and mm fixes, and we continue to work towards building online filesystem check and repair for XFS. Read more about what we're working on at the Oracle Linux kernel blog.

LWN is a great resource for the Linux community. Consider subscribing to support their work!

Top changeset contributors by employer for v5.17..v5.18
Oracle                     188 (12.4%)
Red Hat                    145 (9.5%)
Google                     131 (8.6%)
Huawei Technologies         81 (5.3%)
Novell                      79 (5.2%)

$ cat gitdm/gitdm.config
...
# Use GroupMap to map a file full of addresses to the
# same employer
GroupMap gitdm/oramap Oracle

$ cat gitdm/oramap
willy@infradead.org
djwong@kernel.org

$ git log --pretty=format:"%<(60,mtrunc)%ae %h %s (%ar)" -i --no-merges v5.17..v5.18 -- fs mm kernel | gitdm -c gitdm/gitdm.config -a -d -l 20 2