This paper is participating in the30 years of Linux”Topic essay activity

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In the past

Linux celebrates its 30th birthday on August 25, 2021.

Thirty years ago Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old Graduate computer science student in Finland, posted a short note explaining that he was working on an operating system, Linux, as a hobby.

The reason was simple: Linus loved studying the principles of computers, but didn’t have a professional-grade operating system. With Christmas money, he bought a 386-compatible computer and MINIX software and began studying how the operating system worked. As he studied and practiced, he discovered MINIX’s flaws, which gave him the idea of writing a brand new operating system.

Linux started as a very small project, while GNU was working on an ambitious free, public domain operating system, but the project was delayed, and hobbyists quickly adopted Linus’s new project.

By adopting the GPL license, a free software license that basically commits participating developers to putting their contributions to Linux projects into the public domain, the Linux operating system has managed to establish a complete, even coordinated platform.

For many users, the Linux platform offers great power and flexibility, and features equal to or better than proprietary solutions. In fact, many other operating systems owe a great deal of inspiration to the GNU/Linux project, if not their codebase.

Linux has grown over the past three decades to become the top platform in computing, with a large contingent of volunteer contributors from business, research, academia, and government around the world. It has become, so to speak, a symbol of human achievement.

But Linus himself thinks it technically has four birthdays:

“The first one is the date of the public post on the press panel, which is August 25. Now, you can also find the title, date and time of the post, and the full content of the post.

But version 0.01, while never seen in public (only released in private) and not directly mentioned in emails, is also a historic milestone. You can now find a birth date of 0.01 (September 17) by looking at the creation date in the tar file. So, I think both of them are kind of the birthday of Linux.

Incidentally, some people disagree about the birth date of Linux. For example, the first public mention of Linux came on July 3, when I first publicly sought POSIX documentation on a Minix newsgroup and mentioned that I was working on an as-yet-unnamed project. Linux, on the other hand, made its official debut with version 0.02, with a small patch compared to version 0.01, on October 5th.”

now

One Word to describe Linux is “Work on reading About It.”

Over the years, Linux has grown into a globally available base of free software that has largely enhanced the lives of billions of people around the world, running everything from server computers to smartphones to embedded devices.

The reason for Linux’s success is pretty clear: focus on technology and provide solutions that are useful to people. It’s not a big secret because everyone knows how they work and it’s all out in the open.

Linux has faced a number of challenges over the years, mainly the need for development models to change as developers and users grow. Linux now USES such as publishing model based on time (every two and a half months), and always maintain the stability of each version, have only contains the current in the tree to repair and the stability of the kernel, these are the way they change, make the life of the developer, in equipment used in the Linux kernel user and hope the company more easily.

They are introducing Rust, a new language with different longevity rules, into a kernel that already has a set of existing longevity rules. The developers working on this are making great progress, but ultimately, we will only know if this is possible when their code is merged. It’s still a long way off, but they’re getting there.

The latest patch shows that the Rust for Linux project is making big strides towards the kernel, Linux kernel developers say: we need to work hard to find new programmers, code review is our bottleneck.

And as of May 2021, Linux kernel version 5.13-RC1 has achieved initial support for Apple M1. Currently, it only supports startup, and the use of GPU has not caught up with it, but it has broken through the biggest challenge and laid a solid foundation.

In the future

Top Linux developers are in their twilight years.

In 2019, Linus Torvalds spoke out at the Linux Conference about his concerns about the lack of a Linux maintenance successor. Where does the future hold for Linux projects as the current generation of maintainers ages?

It’s true that the last generation of top programmers is getting old; Linus Torvalds himself turned 50 this year.

When someone statistics Linux kernel developers based on “time spent on projects” as an “age” indicator, it is not difficult to find that the proportion of new generation programmers has been declining year by year. The highest percentage of current participants generally joined the Linux community more than a decade ago, and the percentage has declined in subsequent generations.

“The older generation of contributors are still the backbone of the project,” many Linux core members say. “Linux kernel development has been a failure, and you don’t know how many early members will be left in a few years.” ; “We are getting older and less energetic. The younger generation is not as passionate about kernel development as the original contributors were.”

The Linux Foundation has been trying to solve problems for years. Always trying to attract more new talent. There is now a general consensus that a lack of talent is the biggest obstacle to Linux’s further growth. With LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation hopes to build influence among the new generation of programmers.

Today, Linux, the most popular operating system running on more than 2 billion devices, has become an integral part of the evolution of human technology. We can’t imagine what the consequences would be without maintenance.

I’m actually optimistic about where Linux is going in the future. We believe that there will be generation after generation of developers to enter the door of programming, and Linux will always be their loyal partner!

reference

Wikipedia

The Register

LWN.net