On August 25, 1991, after five months of development, 21-year-old student Linus Torvalds announced on the comp.os.minix newsgroup that he had created a working prototype of a new operating system. Linux, which marked the completion of the bash 1.08 and gcc 1.40 ports. The first public release of the kernel Linux was released on September 17th. Kernel 0.0.1 was 62 KB in size when compressed and contained approximately 10 lines of source code. The modern kernel Linux contains approximately 44 million lines of code.
Core Linux was inspired by the MINIX operating system, which did not suit Linus due to its limited license. Later, when Linux became a well-known project, and detractors attempted to accuse Linus of directly copying the code of some MINIX subsystems. The attack was repelled by Andrew Tanenbaum, the author of MINIX, who commissioned a student to conduct a detailed comparison of the Minix code and the first public versions. LinuxThe results of the study revealed only four minor code block matches, which were determined by POSIX and ANSI C requirements.
Linus originally intended to call the kernel Freax, a portmanteau of "free," "freak," and X (Unix). But the name "Linux"The kernel was obtained thanks to Ari Lemmke, who, at Linus's request, placed the kernel on the university's FTP server, naming the directory containing the archive not "freax," as Torvalds had requested, but "linux." Remarkably, the enterprising businessman William Della Croce managed to register the trademark. Linux and wanted to collect royalties over time, but later changed his mind and transferred all trademark rights to Linus. Official mascot Linux-kernel, the penguin Tux, was chosen as a result of a competition held in 1996. The name Tux stands for Torvalds UniX.
Growth dynamics of the codebase (number of lines of source code) of the kernel:
- 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;
- 5.8 - August 2020, 28.4 million lines of code;
- 5.13 - June 2021, 29.2 million lines of code;
- 5.19 - August 2022, 30.5 million lines of code;
- 6.4 - June 2023, 32.9 million lines of code.
- 6.10 - July 2024, 35.1 million lines of code.
- 6.16 - July 2025, 40.8 million lines of code.
- 7.2 - August 2026, 43.9 million lines of code.
Core Development Progress:
- Linux 0.0.1 - September 1991, first public release supporting only i386 CPUs and booting from floppy disk;
- Linux 0.12 - January 1992, the code began to be distributed under the GPLv2 license;
- Linux 0.95 - March 1992, the ability to run the X Window System was provided, support for virtual memory and a swap partition was implemented.
- Linux 0.96-0.99 — 1992-1993: Work on the network stack began. The Ext2 file system was introduced, support for the ELF file format was added, drivers for sound cards and SCSI controllers were introduced, and kernel module loading and the /proc file system were implemented.
- In 1992, the first SLS and Yggdrasil distributions appeared. In the summer of 1993, the Slackware and Debian.
- Linux 1.0 – March 1994, first officially stable release;
- Linux 1.2 - March 1995, 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;
- Linux 2.0 - June 1996, support for multiprocessor systems;
- March 1997: LKML, a kernel development mailing list, is founded Linux;
- 1998: The first cluster to be included in the Top500 list was launched based on Linux, consisting of 68 nodes with Alpha CPUs;
- Linux 2.2 - January 1999, increased the efficiency of the memory management system, added IPv6 support, a new firewall has been implemented, a new sound subsystem has been introduced;
- Linux 2.4 - February 2001, provides support for 8-processor systems and 64 GB of RAM, Ext3 file system, USB support, ACPI;
- Linux 2.6 - December 2003, SE supportLinux, tools for automatic tuning of kernel parameters, sysfs, redesigned memory management system;
- In 2005, the Xen hypervisor was introduced, which ushered in the era of virtualization;
- In September 2008, the first release of the platform was formed. Android, based on the kernel Linux;
- In July 2011, after 10 years of development of the 2.6.x branch, the transition to 3.x numbering was made. The number of objects in the Git repository has reached 2 million;
- The core was released in 2015 Linux 4.0. The number of git objects in the repository reached 4 million;
- In April 2018, the milestone of 6 million git objects in the core repository was overcome.
- In January 2019, a core branch was formed Linux 5.0. The repository has reached 6.5 million git objects.
- Published in August 2020, the 5.8 kernel was the largest in terms of the number of changes of all the kernels over the entire life of the project.
- In the 5.13 kernel, a record was set for the number of developers (2150), whose changes were included in the kernel.
- The core branch was formed in August 2022 Linux 6.0, since the 5.x branch has accumulated enough releases to change the first number in the version number.
- Kernel 6.1, released in December 2022, added the ability to use Rust as a second language for developing kernel drivers and modules.
- In February 2025, the 40 million lines of source code mark was reached.
- Rust support has been moved from experimental to core kernel features. Linux.
- 2026 saw advances in the use of AI tools for debugging, reviewing changes, identifying bugs, and developing kernel patches. Among other things, Linus Torvalds has begun using AI, for example, recently to identify the root cause of problems in the Intel Xe driver.
About 65% of all changes to the kernel were made by the 20 most active companies. For example, during the development of kernel 7.1, of all changes, 9.1% (a year ago in kernel 6.16 it was 11.3%) were prepared by Intel, 7.7% (6.3%) - Google, 5.2% (5.4%) - AMD, 5.0% (3.6%) - Qualcomm, 4.7% (7.6%) - Red Hat, 3.8% (2.4%) - NVIDIA, 3.4% (2.9%) - Meta, 2.9% (3.0%) - SUSE, 2.5% (2.9%) - Oracle, 2.1% (2.3%) - ARM, 1.4% (1.4%) - IBM, 1.3% (2.4%) - Huawei. 18% (15.3%) of the changes were contributed by independent contributors or developers who did not explicitly state their affiliation with a specific company. Meta, AMD, and Qualcomm led the way in terms of lines of code added to the 7.1 kernel, with contributions of 15.8%, 13.8%, and 7.6%, respectively (in the 6.16 kernel, Intel, Red Hat, and Google led the way with contributions of 9.2%, 7.2%, and 6.9%).
Source: opennet.ru
