28 years ago, on August 25, 1991, after five months of development, the 21-year-old Linus Torvalds announced in a conference call that he was creating a working prototype of a new operating system, for which the completion of the transfer of bash 1.08 and gcc 1.40 was observed.
The first public release of the Linux kernel was unveiled on September 17. The 0.0.1 kernel was 62 Kb in size in compressed form and contained approximately 10 thousand lines of code (compared to the current Linux kernel which has more than 26 million lines of code).
The Linux kernel was inspired by the MINIX operating system, which was not suitable for Linus with his limited license. Later, when Linux became a famous project, detractors tried to accuse Linus of directly copying the code of some MINIX subsystems.
Though These accusations were dismissed by Andrew Tanenbaum, author of MINIX, who instructed one of the students to do a detailed comparison of the Minix code and the first public versions of Linux. The results of the study showed the presence of only four non-essential code block matches, due to the requirements of POSIX and ANSI C.
Linus originally intended to name the core of Freax, from the words "free", "freak" and X (Unix).
But the name "Linux" was given to the kernel by Ari Lemmke, who at Linus's request, placed the kernel on the university's FTP server, naming the directory with the file not "freax", as requested by Torvalds, but "Linux ».
According to a 2010 study commissioned by the European Union, the approximate cost of developing a Linux kernel-like project from scratch would have amounted to more than US $ 13 billion (the calculation was made when the kernel had XNUMX million lines of code).
The official Linux kernel mascot, the Tux penguin, was chosen as a result of a competition held in 1996. The name Tux stands for Torvalds UniX.
En regarding the kernel launches since its first versionUntil the current one we can see the following timeline, where the 2.x.xx branch was the longest of all.
- 0.0.1 - September 1991, 10 thousand lines of code
- 1.0.0 - March 1994, 176 thousand lines of code
- 1.2.0 - March 1995, 311 thousand lines of code
- 2.0.0 - June 1996, 778 thousand lines of code
- 2.2.0 - January 1999, 1.8 million lines of code
- 2.4.0 - January 2001, 3,4 million lines of code
- 2.6.0 - December 2003, 5.9 million lines of code
- 2.6.28 - December 2008, 10,2 million lines of code
- 2.6.35 - August 2010, 13.4 million lines of code
- 3.0 - August 2011, 14,6 million lines of code
- 3.5 - July 2012, 15.5 million lines of code
- 3.10 - July 2013, 15.8 million lines of code
- 3.16 - August 2014, 17.5 million lines of code
- 4.1 - June 2015, 19,5 million lines of code
- 4.7 - July 2016, 21.7 million lines of code
- 4.12 - July 2017, 24,1 million lines of code
- 4.18 - August 2018, 25.3 million lines of code
- 5.2 - July 2019, 26.55 million lines of code
While development progress and featured features:
- Linux 0.0.1 - September 1991, the first public release that only supports the i386 CPU and boots from a floppy disk
- Linux 0.12: January 1992, the code began to be distributed under the GPLv2 license
- Linux 0.95: March 1992, provided the ability to run the X Window System, implemented virtual memory and swap partition support.
- Linux 0.96-0.99: 1992-1993, work started on the network stack. The Ext2 file system is introduced, support for the ELF file format is added, drivers for sound cards and SCSI controllers are introduced, kernel modules and the / proc file system are loaded.
In 1992, the first SLS and Yggdrasil distributions appeared. In the summer of 1993, the Slackware and Debian projects were founded.
- Linux 1.0: March 1994, the first officially stable version
- Linux 1.2: March 1995, a significant increase in the number of drivers, support for Alpha, MIPS and SPARC platforms, expansion of network stack capabilities, introduction of a packet filter, support for NFS
- Linux 2.0: June 1996, support for multiprocessor systems
March 1997: LKML, Linux kernel developers mailing list, founded
1998: Launched the first Linux-based cluster on the Top500 list, consisting of 68 nodes with an Alpha CPU - Linux 2.2- January 1999, increased memory management system efficiency, added IPv6 support, implemented a new firewall, introduced a new sound subsystem
- Linux 2.4: February 2001, support for 8-processor 64GB RAM systems, Ext3 file system, USB support, ACPI
- Linux 2.6: December 2003, SELinux support, tools to automatically tune kernel parameters, sysfs, a redesigned memory management system.
In 2005, the Xen hypervisor was introduced, ushering in an era of virtualization
In September 2008, the first version of the Android platform based on the Linux kernel was formed - Linux 3.0: In July 2011, after 10 years of development of version 2.6.x, a transition to 3.x numbering was made. The number of objects in the Git repository has reached 2 million
- Linux 4.0: In 2015 the Linux 4.0 kernel was released. The number of git objects in the repository has reached 4 million
In April 2018, the milestone of 6 million git objects in the kernel repository was exceeded. - Linux 5.0: In January 2019, the Linux kernel 5.0 branch was formed. The repository has reached the level of 6.5 million git objects.