Linux Kernel Module Growth

The Linux kernel grows at an amazing pace, each kernel release adds more functionality, more drivers and hence more kernel modules.  I recently wondered what the trend was for kernel module growth per release, so I performed module builds on kernels v2.6.24 through to v4.16-rc2 for x86-64 to get a better idea of growth rates:

..as one can see, the rate of growth is relatively linear with about 89 modules being added to each kernel release, which is not surprising as the size of the kernel is growing at a fairly linear rate too.  It is interesting to see that the number of modules has easily more than tripled in the 10 years between v2.6.24 and v4.16-rc2,  with a rate of about 470 new modules per year. At this rate, Linux will see the 10,000th module land in around the year 2025.