Presumably there aren't all that many device drivers in there though? I'd imagine that mostly lived off in a WHQL repo or something in a different department.

Drivers made by Microsoft are in the tree. WHQL'ed 3rd party drivers offered by Windows Update are somewhere else, but there's no source for those so it's hard to count lines of code.

On a typical computer more than half of the drivers loaded are made by Microsoft, you can check easily with sysinternals' autoruns.

And they are in the kernel? What are dozens of .sys files in drivers folder then?

There are at least three different definitions of "in the kernel":

- code that compiles to the single executable file that runs the OS (this can be limited to a mechanism for booting the system, a thread scheduler, basic memory allocator, but this may also contain some device drivers, file systems, etc)

- any code that compiles to anything that will run in kernel mode (many file systems and device drivers)

- the code that someone (say the people distributing what they call "the Linux kernel") call the kernel.

This count is about the third. I do not think it contains a kitchen sink, but it is close :-)

I've got a lot of .ko files in /lib/modules; that doesn't mean they aren't part of the kernel.

Linux supports a wider range of hardware than Windows.

Sure, I'm just offering some stats for comparison, I'm not trying to say anything in particular.

Yup, and I'm just adding something to consider when interpreting it.