Linus Torvalds has released the sixth weekly test release of the upcoming Linux kernel 5.3. And this release is timed to coincide with the 28th anniversary of the release of the original first version of the kernel of the then new OS.
Torvalds paraphrased his first message on this topic for the announcement. It looks like this:
βI make a (free) operating system (more than just a hobby) for 486 AT clones and many other hardware solutions. This has been brewing for the past 28 years and is still not done. I would like to get feedback on any bugs introduced in this release (or older bugs for that matter),β the developer wrote.
However, most of the 5.3-rc6 patch is driver updates for network devices. There are other fixes though. Torvalds noted that the release of RC8 is not excluded. As for the stable release, Linux 5.3 is expected to be released in two or three weeks.
Let us recall that Torvalds made the first release of version 0.0.1 on August 25, 1991, after five months of development. The first public version of the kernel contained about 10 thousand lines of source code and occupied 62 KB in compressed form. The modern Linux kernel has more than 26 million lines of code.
As noted, the approximate development of such a project from scratch would cost from 1 to 3 billion dollars.
Source: 3dnews.ru