AMD Contributes 8.5x More Code to the Linux Kernel Than Nvidia

Written byMichael Larabel inHardware on 15 September 2018 at 08:42 AM EDT.14 Comments

Given all the new hardware enablement work going into the Linux kernel recently, I was curious how the code contributions were stacking up by some of the leading hardware vendors... Here are those interesting numbers.

As of this morning's Linux 4.19 Git kernel state, I ran some Git statistics for some weekend numbers fun primarily to see how AMD vs. NVIDIA vs. Intel is doing for code contributions.

While it shouldn't come as too much surprise given all of the work AMD has been doing on their open-source graphics stack recently while NVIDIA continues to contribute very little (relatively speaking) to the Linux kernel, AMD comes in with more than eight times as many lines of code added to the kernel tree as NVIDIA.

By counting the emails from amd.com (occasionally their developers do use personal email addresses for commits, but for this only the official email addresses from all the vendors were counted), AMD developers have contributed 2,168,104 lines of code to the Linux kernel while removing 414,761 lines in the process, or a net gain of 1,753,343 lines of code.

NVIDIA meanwhile contributed a total of 303,180 lines of code to the kernel and removed 97,197, or a net gain of just 205,983 lines of code. AMD's contributions to the kernel include various AMD CPU/chipset work as well as their open-source AMDKFD/AMDGPU/Radeon graphics driver components and related work on TTM memory management, core DRM, etc. A far majority of NVIDIA's contributions to the Linux kernel are on the Tegra front with supporting their SoCs and developer boards with the Linux kernel code. NVIDIA contributes very few lines of code to the open-source NVIDIA DRM (Nouveau) driver.

So besides AMD having contributed at least ~8.5x as much code to the kernel as NVIDIA, on a commit count AMD.com has made 12,386 commits while NVIDIA is at 4,551.

But Intel, which historically been one of the large corporate contributors to the Linux kernel, continues outpacing both AMD and NVIDIA. Intel developers have made at least 59,926 commits to the kernel and in total the Intel developers have added 3,510,546 in the process while removing 1,732,245 lines of code... or a net gain of 1,778,301 lines of code. AMD isn't too far behind on a pure count of total lines added, but their AMDGPU DRM driver is significantly larger than the Intel DRM driver with a majority of Intel's contributions being to add new features for their processors, chipsets, and related components. Intel's contributions will likely increase even more as their discrete GPU offerings approach in 2020.

When checking out the cloc statistics on the Linux kernel as of today, there were 49,500 files counted that yield 17,044,149 lines of detected code and another 3.5 million lines of code comments and 3.1 million blank lines.

14 Comments