Linux Kernel Surpasses 10 Million Lines of Code

javipas writes "A simple analysis of the most updated version (a Git checkout) of the Linux kernel reveals that the number of lines of all its source code surpasses 10 million, but attention: this number includes blank lines, comments, and text files. With a deeper analysis thanks to the SLOCCount tool, you can get the real number of pure code lines: 6.399.191, with 96.4% of them developed in C, and 3.3% using assembler. The number grows clearly with each new version of the kernel, that seems to be launched each 90 days approximately."

Comments

Lines of code as a metric

[qoncept]

Funny that the summary calls attention to the fact that the number of lines includes comments and whitespace without any mention of how worthless lines of code is as a metric. Someone could easily go in and add or remove newlines wherever they wanted and without changed a bit of code make it 50 million or 50 thousand.

Re:What about the other .3% ?

[glavenoid]

Makefiles, build scripts, etc., perhaps?

Re:Line Count Not Always a Good Thing?

[Microlith]

While Linux is huge, for a backdoor to be successful it would need to hit a huge number of systems. The majority of the kernel at this point tends to be drivers, not all of which are used in a given kernel.

For it to be even remotely worthwhile, it'd have to be placed into something that was both heavily used AND given little attention. These two positions are almost mutually exclusive.

Can anyone think of a place that would fall into these two categories? Even the more seemingly obscure parts of the kernel get attention fairly often and malicious changes wouldn't go unnoticed for long.

Re:Lines of Code

[hondo77]

Why? Are you still using an 80s-era Mac as your primary computer?

Re:Lines of Code

[QRDeNameland]

If 1 Line of Code = 1 Library of Congress, you should acquaint yourself with the Enter key.

Re:Reply from actual kernel developer please . . .

[earlymon]

I'm a developer and was wondering what kind of testing is done to verify the code.

Guinea pigs. Millions of us.

"Actual" code?

[TuringTest]

Comments are also code.

If you only count as code what can be feed to the machine, you should look at the size of the compiled binary. Source code is meant to be read by *humans*, so comments do count. That's why the GPL requires them to be left in the files (the "preferred form" to edit), otherwise it wouldn't be source code.