Linux kernel
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The Linux kernel is a free and open-source,: 4 monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system, which was written to be a free (libre) replacement for Unix.
Linux is provided under the GNU General Public License version 2 only, but it contains files under other compatible licenses.
Since the late 1990s, it has been included in many operating system distributions, many of which are called Linux. A notable operating system is Android which is used in many mobile and embedded devices.
The kernel is deployed on a wide variety of computing systems, such as embedded devices, mobile devices, personal computers, servers, mainframes, and supercomputers.
The kernel has been tailored for specific architectures by modifying the source code, and for some usage scenarios can be configured at build-time via commands instead of requiring code changes. Privileged users can fine-tune kernel parameters at runtime.
Most of the kernel code is written in C as supported by the GNU compiler (GCC) which has extensions beyond standard C. : 18 To optimize the resulting executable (vmlinux) utilization of memory and task execution times, architecture-specific instructions (ISA) are used in the code. : 379–380
Day-to-day development discussions take place on the Linux kernel mailing list (LKML). Changes are tracked using the version control system git, which was originally authored by Torvalds as a free software replacement for BitKeeper.