AMD code influx drives growth in Linux Kernel 7.3-rc1

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux Kernel 7.3-rc1, marking the end of the merge window. This release candidate is notably large, reaching approximately 40.98 million lines of code, including comments and blank spaces.

The significant increase in size is primarily attributed to a massive influx of code from AMD. Specifically, the inclusion of AMD DCN6 (Display Core Next 6) register headers and hardware definitions for next-generation graphics processors accounts for roughly one-third of the entire rc1 patch set. AMD utilizes a method of integrating detailed hardware definitions as C header #defines, which results in extremely long text files and artificially inflates codebase statistics.

When excluding the AMD-specific updates, the development cycle appears standard for a medium-to-large release. The AMD-related drivers, including the AMDGPU graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver, now represent about 16% of the entire Linux kernel.