Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 43. Chapters: /boot/, BogoMips, Completely Fair Scheduler, Configuration Menu Language, Cryptoloop, Debugfs, Dprobes, Dynamic Kernel Module Support, Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset, Graphics Execution Manager, High memory, History of Linux, Initrd, Kernel relocation, Ksplice, LibATA, Linux console, Linux framebuffer, Linux Kernel Library, Linux kernel mailing list, Linux kernel oops, Linux maintainers, Linux Security Modules, Linux Test Project, List of Linux kernel names, List of Linux supported architectures, Loadable kernel module, Menuconfig, Mm tree, Native POSIX Thread Library, O(1) scheduler, O(n) scheduler, RTAI, Run queue, Seqlock, Swappiness, System.map, TinyLinux, Vmlinux, Xconfig, ZRam. Excerpt: The Linux kernel is the operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is a prominent example of free and open source software. The Linux kernel is released under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) (plus some firmware images with various non-free licenses), and is developed by contributors worldwide. Day-to-day development discussions take place on the Linux kernel mailing list. The Linux kernel was initially conceived and created by Finnish computer science student Linus Torvalds in 1991. Linux rapidly accumulated developers and users who adapted code from other free software projects for use with the new operating system. The Linux kernel has received contributions from thousands of programmers. All Linux distributions released have been based upon the Linux kernel. In April 1991, Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki, Finland started working on some simple ideas for an operating system. He started with a task switcher in Intel 80386 assembly language and a terminal driver. On 25 August 1991, Torvalds posted the following to comp.os.minix, a newsgroup on Usenet: After that, many people contributed code to the project. Early on, the MINIX community contributed code and ideas to the Linux kernel. At the time, the GNU Project had created many of the components required for a free operating system, but its own kernel, GNU Hurd, was incomplete and unavailable. The BSD operating system had not yet freed itself from legal encumbrances. Despite the limited functionality of the early versions, Linux rapidly accumulated developers and users. By September 1991, Linux version 0.01 was released on the FTP server (ftp.funet.fi) of the Finnish University and Research Network (FUNET). It had 10,239 lines of code. In October 1991, Linux version 0.02 was released. In December 1991, Linux 0.11 was released. This version was the first to be self-hosted - Linux 0.11 could be compiled by a computer running