That's the original date on the file, but the comment being discussed (and much of the code in that function, it seems) was from 17 years ago. See the git-blame:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blame/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421ba...
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blame/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421ba...
edit: Found this [0]
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history, even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about 3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
0: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1da177e4c3f41524e88...