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Welcome to the new Linux Kernel Foundry!
With this foundry we hope to build a central resource for Linux Kernel related information.
Given the release of the Linux 2.4 kernel and the start of OSDN's Linux Kernel Month, it is perhaps useful to reflect on the past nine years; it is perhaps sobering to consider that Linux will have been around for a decade this fall. Ten years of Linux! How things have changed, and yet in many ways, stayed the same.
It was in September, 1991, that Linus released the 0.01 version of what would eventually be called Linux. Back then, the folks who worked on it were mainly hobbists. These were people, from literally all over the globe, who were working together for the joy of producing something new --- the Linux kernel.
Ten years later, many, if not most, of those initial core developers are still at work at the Linux kernel. But since then, Linux has attracted the notice of the entire Unix industry, and so contributions are also streaming in from not only companies like VA Linux and Red Hat, but also SGI, IBM, HP, EMC, and many others. And Linux, far from just being a toy operating system originally written so that a young Linus could learn more about the '386 memory management primitives, has grown up to an enterprise capable operating system that can run on everything from a handheld iPaq to an IBM mainframe, and everything in between.
The 2.4 Linux kernel provides many features that take Linux from being a superlative platform for web servers and other essential Internet services (for example, it appears at this writing that after the week of embarassing outages, Microsoft's DNS servers are running Linux) and move it into the next level: Enterprise computing. The Linux 2.4 kernel provides better SMP scalability, faster networking support, large memory support (up to 64GB), 32 bit user and group id's, a Logical Volume Manager, raw device I/O, and much, much more.
One of the key strengths of the Linux development community has been that while it listens to the requests and requirements of its user space --- including those corporate enterprise users who have been demanding features that previously had only been seen in the highest priced commercial Unix systems --- the ongoing development and maintenance of the kernel has stayed out of the direct control of these corporate interests. As a result, Linux has managed to avoid the dreaded curse of many a software project that has been developed on Internet Time: that of being told, "ship it and now and start adding these new features; we'll have time to clean it up a few months from now." The success of keeping this dynamic tension is one of the many reasons why I am proud to call myself a member of the Linux development community.
So here we are. At the beginning of a new year, at the beginning of a new millenium, and at the beginning of a new stable kernel series for Linux. It's been a wild and crazy ride for these past nine-plus years, and I'm sure the next decade will see even more exiting developments for Linux and the entire Open Source community. I can't wait to see what the rest of this millenium has in store for us!
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Ted Ts'o |
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January 27, 2001 |
Here are some articles discussing the recent release of the Linux 2.4 kernel.
Some Linux Kernel related links:
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