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Linux 4.18 Preparing Many New Features While Dropping 100k+ Lines of Code (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Linux 4.18 development is going strong with recent 4.18-rc1 release. This kernel cycle has dropped 107,210 lines of code so far but Linux 4.18 is adding many new features. The kernel is coming in lighter as a result of the LustreFS code being removed and other code cleanups. On the feature front, Phoronix reports, "ew AMDGPU support improvements, mainlining of the V3D DRM driver, initial open-source work on NVIDIA Volta GV100 hardware, merging of the Valve Steam Controller kernel driver, merging of the BPFILTER framework, ARM Spectre mitigation work, Speck file-system encryption support, removal of the Lustre file-system, the exciting restartable sequences system call was merged, the new DM writecache target, and much more."
In this case what was removed was mostly components in the staging sub-section that had been there for years (over half a decade in many cases) but hadn't completed appreciable work towards exiting the Staging sub-section. So they're finally getting the boot back out of kernel since they had never graduated to 'full kernel support' due to lack of action on their devs part. Lustre in particular basically stopped contributing to the staging branch since they felt it slowed them down too much versus working on their out-of-tree version of the code instead.