Linux 4.17's Staging Area Loses Some Weight

While the Linux 4.17 kernel is getting much larger in some areas like the sizable additions to DRM this cycle, when it comes to the kernel's staging area where new/experimental code gets vetted before being officially mainline, it's lost tens of thousands of lines of code this cycle.

For the 4.17 merge window, the staging area adds in 27,014 lines of code but drops 91,104 lines of code -- or a net loss of about 64 thousand lines of code. This loss comes with some old code being deleted include the CCREE crypto, FSL-DPAA2, IRDA, and other bits. The FSL-MC code meanwhile was promoted out of staging and the MT7261 platform has staging support for DMA, DTS, ETH, GPIO, PCI, PINCTRL, and SPI.

The full list of staging changes can be found here for the 4.17 merge window. It will be interesting to see what else gets tidied up with still seeing some old remnants in the tree like the XGI frame-buffer driver...

While a 64 thousand line of code drop from the kernel is significant, it's not nearly as big as the removal of obsolete CPU architectures also happening for Linux 4.17 and a let up of around a half million lines of code.