Linux Timeline
25 AUGUST 1991 - Linus announces on comp.os.minix
Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, starts toying with the idea of creating his own clone of the Minix OS.
17 SEPTEMBER 1991 - v0.01 Posted on ftp.funet.fi
This release includes Bash v1.08 and GCC v1.40. At this time, the source-only OS is free of any Minix code and has a multi-threaded file system.
NOVEMBER 1991 - v0.10 Linux is self-building
Linus overwrites critical parts of his Minix partition. Since he couldn’t boot into Minix, he decided to write the programs to compile Linux under itself.
5 JANUARY 1992 - v0.12 GPL license
Linux originally had its own licence to restrict commercial activity. Linus switches to GPL with this release.
7 MARCH 1992 - v0.95 X windows
A hacker named Orest Zborowski ports X Windows to Linux.
14 MARCH 1994 - v1.0.0 C++ compiled
The first production release. Linus had been overly optimistic in naming v0.95 and it took about two years to get version 1.0 out the door.
7 MARCH 1995 - v1.2.0 Linux ‘95
Portability is one of the first issues to be addressed and this version gains support for computers using processors based on the Alpha, SPARC and MIPS architectures.
9 JUNE 1996 - v2.0.0 SMP support
Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) is added, which made it a serious contender for many companies.
20 FEBRUARY 2002 - v2.5.5 64-bit CPUs
The first to support AMD 64-bit (x86-64) and PowerPC 64-bit.
17 DECEMBER 2003 - v2.6.0 The beaver detox
Major overhaul to Loadable Kernel Modules (LKM). Improved performance for enterprise-class hardware, the Virtual Memory subsystem, the CPU scheduler and the I/O scheduler.
29 NOVEMBER 2006 - v2.6.19 ext4
Experimental support for the ext4 filesystem.
5 FEBRUARY 2007 - v2.6.20 KVM arrives
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is merged, adding Intel and AMD hardware virtualisation extensions.
25 DECEMBER 2008 - v2.6.28 Graphics rewrite
The Linux graphics stack was fully updated to ensure it utilised the full power of modern GPUs.
21 JULY 2011 - v3.0 20-years young
This version bump is not about major technological changes, but instead marks the kernel’s 20th anniversary.
18 MARCH 2012 - v3.3 EFI Boot support
An EFI boot stub enables an x86 bzImage to be loaded and executed directly by EFI firmware.
12 APRIL 2015 - v4.0 Hurr Durr I’ma Sheep released
Linus Torvalds decides to poll the decision to increment the next release to 4.x. It also approved the name.
MARCH 2019 - v5.0 Shy Crocodile
Major additions include: WireGuard, USB 4, 2038 fix, Spectre fixes, RISC-V support, exFAT, AMDGPU and so much more!
2021… -- v6+ The future…
Who knows what the next 25 years has in store for Tux...
