Last year, Linux’s source code came to a whopping 27.8 million lines of code. It’s only gotten bigger since then. Like any 30-year old software project, Linux has picked up its fair share of cruft over the years. Now, after months of work, senior Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar is releasing his first stab at cleaning it up at a fundamental level with his “Fast Kernel Headers” project.

The object? No less than a comprehensive clean-up and rework of the Linux kernel’s header hierarchy and header dependencies. Linux contains many header, .h, files. To be exact there are about 10,000 main .h headers in the Linux kernel with the include/ and arch/*/include/ hierarchies. As Molnar explained, “Over the last 30+ years they have grown into a complicated & painful set of cross-dependencies we are affectionately calling ‘Dependency Hell’.”

Cleaning up the Linux kernel's 'Dependency Hell': This developer is proposing 2,200 commit changes. More>