August 25, 1991, after five months of development, the 21-year-old student, Linus Torvalds, announced on the teleconference comp.os.minix that a working prototype had been completed of the new operating system Linux, porting bash 1.08 and gcc 1.40.
In this manner would unknowingly become the first public release of the Linux kernel which was presented on September 17. Kernel 0.0.1 was compressed into 62 KB and contained around 10.000 lines of source code, which unlike the current version, the modern Linux kernel has over 30 million lines of code.
The Linux kernel was inspired by the MINIX operating system, which didn't suit Linus with his limited license. Subsequently, when Linux became a well-known project, the detractors tried to accuse Linus of copying directly the code of some subsystems MINIX.
The attack was repelled by Andrew Tanenbaum, author of MINIX, who commissioned a student to make 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 minor code block matches, due to POSIX and ANSI C requirements.
Linus originally thought of naming the kernel 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 Torvalds requested, but "linux".
It is noteworthy that the enterprising businessman William Della Croce managed to register the Linux trademark and wanted to collect royalties over time, but later changed his mind and transferred all rights to the trademark to Linus. The official mascot of the Linux kernel, the penguin Tux, was chosen as a result of a contest held in 1996 and whose name Tux stands for Torvalds UniX.
With regards to history of kernel development, we share a little of it:
- September 1991: Linux 0.0.1, first public release that only supports i386 CPU and boots from floppy disk.
January 1992: Linux 0.12, the code began to be distributed under the GPLv2 license - March 1992: Linux 0.95, provided the ability to run the X Window System, support for virtual memory and partition swapping, and the first SLS and Yggdrasil distributions appeared.
- In the summer of 1993, the Slackware and Debian projects were founded.
March 1994: Linux 1.0, first officially stable version.
March 1995: Linux 1.2, significant increase in the number of drivers, support for Alpha, MIPS and SPARC platforms, expansion of network stack capabilities, appearance of a packet filter, NFS support. - June 1996: Linux 2.0, support for multiprocessor systems.
- January 1999: Linux 2.2, increased memory management system efficiency, added support for IPv6, implementation of a new firewall, introduced a new sound subsystem
- February 2001: Linux 2.4, support for 8-processor systems and 64 GB of RAM, Ext3 file system, USB, ACPI support.
- December 2003: Linux 2.6, SELinux support, automatic kernel tuning tools, sysfs, redesigned memory management system.
- En septiembre de 2008, the first version of the Android platform based on the Linux kernel was formed.
- In July 2011, after 10 years of development of the 2.6.x branch, the transition to 3.x numbering was made.
- In 2015, Linux 4.0, the number of git objects in the repository has reached 4 million.
- In April of 2018, I overcome the barrier of 6 million git-core objects in the repository.
- In January of 2019, the Linux 5.0 kernel branch was formed.
- Posted in August 2020, kernel 5.8 was the largest in terms of the amount of changes of all kernels during the entire life of the project.
- In 2021, code for developing Rust language drivers was added to the next branch of the Linux kernel.
- In August of 2022, the Linux kernel 6.0 branch was formed, as there were enough versions in the 5.x branch to change the first number in the version number.