Systemd Blasts Ahead With A Record Number Of Commits In 2021

With the continuously growing set of features and functionality provided by systemd, this year saw the project hitting record growth in terms of commit activity that easily surpassed prior years. Surprisingly, Lennart Poettering dropped from his spot as the one responsible for the most commits each year.

With the end of the year upon us, I ran some systemd GitStats in being curious how this year panned out from a quantitative perspective on the development pace... Systemd in 2021 features like unlocking encrypted volumes using TPM2 / FIDO2 / PKCS#11 hardware, introduction of the system extension images concept, an option for simple whole file-system A/B updates, maturing of systemd OOMD, and the massive set of changes in systemd 250 released earlier this month.

As of this past weekend when running GitStats, systemd is up to 4,689 files that comprise around 1.62 million lines of code.There have been more than 55k commits to the systemd repository from around 1,992 different authors over its history.

Systemd this year saw more than 6,683 commits! That's one thousand more than last year. Systemd over the course of 2021 saw 269k lines of code added and 120k lines removed. Though on the line addition basis it comes in behind last year's 314k additions (and 116k removed).

For the past decade we have been used to seeing systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering take the top spot for the most commits each year... But in 2021 was an upset and Red Hat's Yu Watanabe has jumped into the top spot. Yu Watanabe was responsible for nearly 30% of the commits this year while Lennart was in the number two spot followed by Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Luca Boccassi, Frantisek Sumsal, and Daan De Meyer. There were around 365 different authors to systemd this year while Red Hat overwhelmingly continues to guide its development.

With systemd continuing to add features for modernizing Linux systems, the line count continues steadily rising.

Those wanting to go through all of this year's systemd GitStats numbers can find them here.