LINUX-A REVOLUTION

TUX is an official mascot of LINUX

Linux is one of the fastest growing operating systems in the history. From a few dedicated fanatics in 1991-92 to millions of general users at present, it is certainly a remarkable journey. Started as a humble project by a Finnish second year computer science student , today it has covered the global computer market ranging from small palmtops to the supercomputers. The evolution and study of Linux traces back the evolution of operating systems right from the second generation to the present generation.

LINUS BENEDICT TORVALDS
In 1991, Linus Benedict Torvalds a Finnish student at the University of Helsinki and a self-taught hacker independently developed monolithic Linux kernel. He released the kernel on the World Wide Web and developers around the globe helped in the development of the full fledged version.

The first Linux kernel released was Version 0.01, dated May 14, 1991. The code sized 9300 lines in C and 950 lines of assembler. It had no networking, ran only on 80386-compatible processors and had limited device-driver support. The virtual memory subsystem was basic and included no support for memory mapped files.
The next version, Linux 1.0, was released on March 14, 1994. It sized 16500 lines in C. The biggest new feature was networking: it included support for UNIX’s standard TCP/IP networking protocols, as well as a BSD socket interface for networking programming. This included a much enhanced file system and supported a range of SSCI controllers for high-performance disk access.
As development progressed, the Linux 1.2 kernel was released in March, 1995. It supported much wider variety of hardware, including the new PCI hardware bus architecture. They also updated the networking stack to provide support for the IPX protocol and made the IP implementation more complete by including accounting and firewalling functionality.
In June, 1996 Linux 2.0 was released. This release was given a major version number increment on account of two major new capabilities: support for multiple architectures, including a fully 64-bit native Alpha port, and support for multiprocessor architectures. The changes in 2.0 did not stop here. The memory management code was substantially improved to provide unified cache for file- system data independent of the caching of block devices. The 2.0 kernel also included much improved TCP/IP performance, and a number of new networking protocols were added, including AppleTalk, AX.25 amateur radio networking, and ISDN support. Other major improvements were support for internal kernel threads, for handling dependencies between loadable modules, and for automatic loading of modules on demand. Additional new features included file-system quotas and POSIX-compatible real-time process-scheduling classes.
Improvement continued with the release of Linux 2.2 in January 1999. A port for UltraSPARC systems was added. Networking was enhanced with more flexible firewalling, better routing and traffic management, and support for TCP large window and selective acks. Acorn, Apple, and NT disks could now be read, and NFS was enhanced and a kernel-mode NFS daemon added. Signal handling, interrupts, and some I/O were locked at a finer level than before to improve symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) performance.
Advances in 2.4 and 2.6 releases of the kernel include increased support for SMP systems, journaling fie-systems, and enhancements to the memory-management system. The process scheduler has been modified in version 2.6, providing an efficient O(1) scheduling algorithm. In addition the Linux 2.6 kernel is now pre-emptive, allowing a process to be pre-empted while running in kernel mode.

Constant work is been done for further advancement of the kernel with the help of hackers around the world you can also drop in and check out if you too can amalgamate your flair…