Science and technology

Happy birthday to the Linux kernel: What’s your favourite launch?

Let’s make a journey again to August 1991, when historical past was within the making. The tech world confronted many pivotal moments that proceed to impression us immediately. An intriguing challenge referred to as the World Wide Web was introduced by Tim Berners-Lee and the primary web site was launched. Super Nintendo was launched within the United States and a brand new chapter of gaming started for teenagers of all ages. At the University of Helsinki, a scholar named Linus Torvalds requested his friends for suggestions on a brand new free working system he had been creating as a pastime. It was then that the Linux kernel was born.

Today, we are able to browse greater than 1.5 billion web sites, play with 5 further Nintendo recreation consoles on our televisions, and preserve six longterm Linux kernels. Here’s what a few of our writers needed to say about their favourite Linux kernel launch.  

“The one that introduced modules (was it 1.2?). It was a big step towards a successful Linux future.” —Milan Zamazal 

“2.6.9 as it was the version at the time when I joined Red Hat in 2006 (in RHEL4). But also a slightly bigger love for 2.6.18 (RHEL5) as it was the one which was deployed at massive scale / for mission critical workloads at all our largest customers (Telco, FSI). It also brought one of our biggest techno change with virtualization (Xen then KVM).” —Herve Lemaitre

“Kernel 4.10. (although I have no idea how to measure this).” —Ivan Bazulic 

“The new kernel that shipped with Fedora 30 fixed a suspend issue with my Thinkpad Yoga laptop; suspend now works flawlessly. I’m a jerk and just lived with this and never filed a bug report, so I’m especially appreciative of the work I know must have gone into fixing this.” —Máirín Duffy 

“I will always have a special place in my heart for the 2.6.16 release. It was the first kernel that I was responsible for converting to run on the hertz neverlost gps system. I lead the effort to build the kernel and root filesystem for that device, it was truly a magical time for me. We updated the kernel several times after that initial release, but I think I’ll have to go with the original version. Sadly, I don’t really have any technical reasons for this love, it’s purely sentimental =)” —Michael McCune

“My favorite Linux kernel release was the 2.4.0 series, it integrated support for USB, the LVM, and ext3. Ext3 being the first mainline Linux filesystem to have journaling support and available with the 2.4.15 kernel. My very first kernel release was 2.2.13.” —Sean Nelson

“Maybe it’s 2.2.14, because it’s the version that ran on the first Linux I ever installed (Mandrake Linux 7.0, in 2000 IIRC). It was also the first version I ever had to recompile to get my video card, or my modem (can’t recall) working.” —Germán Pulido

“I think the latest one! But I had for a time used the realtime kernel extensions for audio production.” —Mario Torre

Of the greater than 52 versions of the Linux kernel, which one is your favourite? Take our ballot and inform us why within the feedback.

 

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