Today the Linux Kernel celebrates its 30th anniversary and it still has a lot to give

At the beginning of the month we released the note of the 30th anniversary of the publication of the first website, a fact that undoubtedly marked history and of which I have always related a bit to Linux, since both the publication of the first website as well as the first prototype of the Linux Kernel go hand in hand, since both were released in the same year.

As on August 25, 1991, after five months of development, 21-year-old student Linus Torvalds ad in the comp.os.minix conference call I was working on a working prototype of a new operating system Linux, for which the portability of bash 1.08 and gcc 1.40 had been completed. This first public version of the Linux kernel was released on September 17.

Kernel 0.0.1 was 62 KB in compressed form and it contained about 10 thousand lines of source code which compared to today's Linux kernel has more than 28 million lines of code.

According to a study commissioned by the European Union in 2010, the approximate cost of developing a project similar to a modern Linux kernel from scratch would have been more than a billion dollars (calculated when the kernel had 13 million lines of code), according to another estimate at more than 3 billion.

A bit about Linux

The Linux kernel was inspired by the MINIX operating system, which Linus didn't like with his limited license. Later, when Linux became a famous project, the wicked they tried to accuse Linus of directly copying the code of some MINIX subsystems.

The attack was repelled by the author of MINIX, Andrew Tanenbaum, who commissioned a student to do a detailed comparison of the Minix code with the first public versions of Linux. Study results showed the presence of only four negligible code block matches due to POSIX and ANSI C requirements.

Linus originally thought of calling the kernel Freax, from free, freak and X (Unix). But the kernel got the name "Linux" with the light hand of Ari Lemmke, who, at Linus's request, put the kernel on the university's FTP server, naming the directory with the file not "freax," as Torvalds requested, but "linux."

Notably, entrepreneurial entrepreneur William Della Croce managed to trademark Linux and wanted to collect royalties over time, but then changed his mind and transferred all rights to the trademark to Linus. The official mascot for the Linux kernel, the Tux penguin, was selected through a competition held in 1996. The name Tux stands for Torvalds UniX.

Regarding the growth of the Kernel during the last 30 years:

  • 0.0.1 - September 1991, 10 thousand lines of code
  • 1.0.0 - March 1994, 176 thousand lines
  • 1.2.0 - March 1995, 311 thousand lines
  • 2.0.0 - June 1996, 778 thousand lines
  • 2.2.0 - January 1999, 1,8 million lines
  • 2.4.0 - January 2001, 3,4 million lines
  • 2.6.0 - December 2003, 5,9 million lines
  • 2.6.28 - December 2008, 10,2 million lines
  • 2.6.35 - August 2010, 13,4 million lines
  • 3.0 - August 2011, 14,6 million lines
  • 3.5 - July 2012, 15,5 million lines
  • 3.10 - July 2013, 15,8 million lines
  • 3.16 - August 2014, 17,5 million lines
  • 4.1 - June 2015, 19,5 million lines
  • 4.7 - July 2016, 21,7 million lines
  • 4.12 - July 2017, 24,1 million lines
  • 4.18 - August 2018, 25,3 million lines
  • 5.2 - July 2019, 26,55 million lines
  • 5.8 - August 2020, 28,4 million lines
  • 5.13 - June 2021, 29,2 million lines

While for the part of development and news:

  • 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.

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