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Development

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Developer community edit The community of Linux kernel developers comprises about 5000-6000 members. According to the "2017 State of Linux Kernel Development", a study issued by the Linux Foundation, covering the commits for the releases 4.8 to 4.13, about 1500 developers were contributing from about 200-250 companies on average. The top 30 developers contributed a little more than 16% of the code. As of companies, the top contributors are Intel (13.1%) and Red Hat (7.2%), Linaro (5.6%), IBM (4.1%), the second and fifth places are held by the 'none' (8.2%) and 'unknown' (4.1%) categories. Instead of a roadmap, there are technical guidelines. Instead of a central resource allocation, there are persons and companies who all have a stake in the further development of the Linux kernel, quite independently from one another: People like Linus Torvalds and I don’t plan the kernel evolution. We don’t sit there and think up the roadmap for the next two years, then ass...
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Linux kernel

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The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was conceived and created 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 created as open source and free software, and based on UNIX as a by-product of the fallout of the Unix wars. Since then, it has spawned a plethora of operating system distributions, commonly also called Linux. Linux is deployed on a wide variety of computing systems, such as embedded devices, mobile devices (including its use in the Android operating system), personal computers, servers, mainframes, and supercomputers. It can be tailored for specific architectures and for several usage scenarios using a family of simple commands (that is, without the need of manually editing its source code before compilation); privileged users can also fine-tune kernel parameters at runtime. Most of the Linux kernel code is written ...
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Architecture

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Linux is a monolithic kernel with a modular design (e.g, it can insert and remove loadable kernel modules at runtime), supporting most features once only available in closed source kernels of non-free operating systems: concurrent computing and (with the availability of enough CPU cores for tasks that are ready to run) even true parallel execution of many processes at once (each of them having one or more threads of execution) on SMP and NUMA architectures; selection and configuration of hundreds of kernel features and drivers (using one of the " make *config " family of commands, before running compilation), modification of kernel parameters before booting (usually by inserting instructions into the lines of the GRUB2 menu), and fine tuning of kernel behavior at run-time (using the sysctl(8) interface to /proc/sys/ ); configuration (again using the make *config commands) and run-time modifications of the policies (via nice(2), setpriority(2) and the family of sched_*(2) s...
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