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Comment by acatton | Hacker News Reader

It looks like they're cheating the numbers by using the concept of "'core' of the kernel", whatever that means.

> Oracle is the #1 contributor to the "core" of the kernel, in terms of number of changesets.

While, I think most Intel and AMD contributions are very likely drivers related, it really feels like Oracle tried to find a statistic which fits their narrative.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1122/

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That could actually make sense to me; drivers tend to be vendor specific, so I wouldn't feel too bad about giving credit for whoever does the most in the shared parts.

It appears that most of their contributions were to the XFS filesystem. Which means it is not used by "everyone" in a very similar sense to the way in which hardware drivers are not.

I suspect that if "core" were defined to exclude hardware _and_ filesystem independent changes Oracle would not have been at the top of the list.

To be honest I think the "core" distinction actually makes sense.

“Core of the kernel” reads like we’re getting lost in nomenclature

Nucleus of Linux-Kernel ;)

Don't you mean "the Nucleus of the Core of the Kernel"? :-D

No, the IBM Nucleus from the 60' ;)

Well, you NIP'd that in the IPL bud.

I've only used big iron in anger (as part of my company's "ways of doing things" - and all of it unexciting parts of my job, and many years ago). I was not aware of said Nucleus before you brought it up. So I guess today I learned something. Cheers!

IIRC AMD commits a large volume of generated data for drivers, so it's maybe not precisely what most people think of when they think of lines of code.

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