Linux is 25 years old / King Servers Blog

Linus Torvalds in person

Time runs very fast, and the Linux operating system is already a quarter century old. It would be more correct to say that the core of this operating system was 25 years old. Probably all readers of Habrahabr are familiar with the general history of Linux. On August 25, 1991, five months after starting work on his project, 21-year-old Linus Torvalds (then still a student) talked about creating a prototype of a completely new OS called Linux.

September 17, 1991 the first public release of the Linux kernel. The kernel version at that time is 0.0.1. Even then, the number of lines of kernel code was 10 thousand. Its size was only 62 Kb in compressed form. Now the kernel has many times more lines of code - as many as 19 million. If the OS were developed by a commercial organization, the cost of such a project would be about a billion US dollars, or even more.

Linus Torvalds decided to create a kernel after working with the MINIX operating system. She did not arrange a student with a limited license. As usual, Torvalds tried to accuse of plagiarism. Namely, he simply copied the code for a number of MINIX subsystems. But experts were able to prove that this is not so. MINIX author Andrew Tanenbaum himself compared the code of his OS and Linux, and came to the conclusion that there are only a few minor coincidences in the code that you can ignore. These matches are due to a number of POSIX and ANSI C requirements.

Interestingly, Linux could initially be called Freax (“free”, “freak”, and X (Unix)). This name was given to his project by Linus himself. But Ari Lemmke, who, at the request of Linus, posted the kernel on his FTP server, called the directory with the kernel “linux”. Since its first release, the kernel has undergone many transformations. Here are the visual statistics:

• 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.

The kernel is developed by third-party developers. According to the Linux Foundation, since 2005, 13,500 specialists have participated in the development of the system. The average speed of working on the system is 7.8 patches per hour. Not only independent developers, but also many representatives of large technology corporations take part in the development of the system. Among others, Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, Samsung, SUSE, IBM, Renesas, Google, AMD, Taxas Instuments and ARM can be mentioned.

“I am very pleased with the desktop version of Linux. Of course, I wanted Linux to capture the world of desktop PCs, but as it turned out, this area is very difficult to capture. I am still working on this. 25 years have passed. I can spend another 25 years on it. I will achieve my long siege, ”Linus Torvalds said during his April speech at the Embedded Linux conference.

According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, "at 25, Linux looks solid ... the OS has gone further than we could expect." In his opinion, the operating system continues to develop according to plan, and will exist in the distant future.



According to most Linux developers, this OS is extremely important. In particular, it has a certain impact on the path of development of mankind. Today, Linux is far from a research project. Based on this OS, a huge number of enterprise systems and supercomputers work. Based on this OS, Android OS and a number of other commercial projects were created. Linux runs trading exchanges, banking and corporate systems. Linux has long been the main OS for data centers of a number of large and medium-sized companies.

“The joint work in the course of which each of its participants is being improved is a high goal, and it is of great importance,” said Jim Zemlin. “This is a manifestation of the magic of Linux and the whole of Open Source, and it is precisely these results that the Linux movement came in 25 years from now.”

Well, it remains only to wish the developers of this OS future success and recognition. Linux helps fight monopolies in the OS market, but even more this operating system helps both companies and individual users. In the same mobile sphere, the current leader is Android OS based on the Linux kernel. According to several studies, the share of Linux in enterprise systems and desktops is increasing. This dynamics is likely to continue in the future.

Happy Birthday Linux! Happy anniversary!