• 2 min read
Rust remake revives Linux 0.11 after Torvalds' fork jab
A Beihang University student has reimplemented Linux 0.11 in Rust, turning a 1991 kernel into a 47,000-line experiment.
Image: The Register
A student project has turned Linux 0.11 into a Rust rewrite just days after Linus Torvalds told critics to go fork the kernel. The timing is neat, but this is not really that: linux-0.11-rs is not a fork of modern Linux, or even a port. It is a full reimplementation of a much earlier release.
The project comes from an undergraduate at Beihang University in Beijing, China, using the handle Poseidon. It is based on Linux kernel 0.11, released on December 8, 1991, only a few months after Linux 0.01. That made it the last Linux release of the project’s first year. Version 0.12 followed in January 1992, then the numbering jumped to 0.95 in March, with kernel 1.0 arriving two years later.
In the 0.11 release notice, Torvalds wrote:
“Linux-0.11 has a few rather major improvements, but perhaps most notably, is the first kernel where some other people start making real contributions.”
He also said:
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“This is a major milestone, since it makes the kernel much more powerful than Minix was at the time.”
According to the source article, this is also the point where Ted Ts’o first appears as a contributor.
The Rust version is far larger than the original. A Ghloc run by Pajecawav, cited by user dminik, put it at a little over 47,000 lines of Rust. Dminik’s breakdown says about 15,000 lines are kernel code, with the rest covering utilities, libraries, and programs that run on the system. In other words, the project extends beyond the kernel itself to recreate more of the surrounding OS.
Poseidon also credited a tutorial on writing an OS kernel in Rust. Some online commenters dismissed the effort as a waste of compute, but as The Register notes, nobody is going to deploy a bot-generated rewrite of a prototype kernel from 35 years ago. Even so, as an experiment in systems programming, linux-0.11-rs echoes the spirit of the original Linux project, which Torvalds began at 22 and described as “Just for Fun.”
Computing Editor
Tomas lives in the terminal. He covers chips, laptops, and operating systems with a focus on performance and efficiency. He reads kernel changelogs the way other people read fiction, and he's always on the hunt for the perfect mechanical keyboard switch. If it processes data, Tomas has an opinion on it.
via The Register
