The Linux Kernel Archives

Welcome to the Linux Kernel Archives. This is the primary site for the Linux kernel source, but it has much more than just Linux kernels.
Frequently Asked Questions

Protocol Location HTTP http://www.kernel.org/pub/ FTP ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/ RSYNC rsync://rsync.kernel.org/pub/

Latest Stable Kernel:
	3.5.4

Site News

• As noted previously, kernel.org suffered a security breach. Because of this, we have taken the time to rearchitect the site in order to improve our systems for developers and users of kernel.org. To this end, we would like all developers who previously had access to kernel.org who wish to continue to use it to host their git and static content, to follow the instructions here.

  Right now, www.kernel.org and git.kernel.org have been brought back online. All developer git trees have been removed from git.kernel.org and will be added back as the relevant developers regain access to the system.

  Thanks to all for your patience and understanding during our outage and please bear with us as we bring up the different kernel.org systems over the next few weeks. We will be writing up a report on the incident in the future.

• On Aug 25, 2011 Happy 20th Birthday Linux!
  For everyone who doesn't know, on this day 20 years ago, a Helsinki Grad student named Linus declared he had a little hobby OS to share with everyone. That original e-mail can be found here.
  The rest, as they say, is history!

• On June 8, 2011 starting at midnight UTC the Linux Kernel Archives will participate in World IPv6 Day; we will enable IPv6 on as many of our services as possible on that date. At that time the ipv6.kernel.org test address (see below) will be removed.

• May 12, 2011: For testing purposes only, we now have an IPv6 site at http://ipv6.kernel.org. This is a temporary name, and will go away on June 8, 2011. Supported services are http, ftp, rsync, and git.

• April 1, 2011: Kernel.org would like to officially unveil are long existing parrallel infrastructure. Since it's inception we've been concerned with total and catastrophic failure of our systems, and have secretely and quietly run a full and parallel infrastructure. Today, we have decided to lift the veil and no longer hide behind the security through obscurity.

  Kernel.org would like to Officially announce Kernel.org Skynet.

  And for such an unveiling of such an important piece of our infrastructure I would also like to announce the generous donation from Google to help support Skynet: the purchase of an set of aircraft to keep kernel.org in the air at all times, making kernel.org the first flying datacenter! Further details are over on the Skynet website.

• Nov 3, 2010: We would like to announce that we have done some fairly major system upgrades to several pieces of our infrastructure. These upgrades were made possible by the generosity of both Google and HP. These upgrades add two new machines to the infrastructure and replace two aging machines that have serve us quite well over the years.

  On the replacement front we have replaced mirrors1 and mirrors2, the US based mirror machines, with two new machines.

  • Mirrors1: Is now an HP DL380 G7 with dual Quad Core E5640 Xeon CPUs, 144G of Ram and 66 x 300G 10K RPM 2.5in drives.
  • Mirrors2: Is now an HP DL380 G6 with dual Quad Core X5550 Xeon CPUs, 144G of Ram and 66 x 300G 10K RPM 2.5in drives.

  UPDATE: Because I've gotten so many e-mails on this, no the 66 drives is not a typo we have two HP MSA70 chassis' attached to each machine. Giving us 25 per chassis, and 16 in the head node meaning 25 + 25 + 16 = 66.

  On the new machine front we have acquired two machines, both based out of the US at OSUOSL

  • Demeter2: We have acquired a machine to run in parallel with our existing dynamic web machine, which hosts such things as bugzilla, the wikis, kerneloops, etc. The new box is an HP HP DL380 G6 with dual Quad Core X5550 Xeon CPUs, 32G of Ram and 8 x 300G 10K RPM 2.5in drives.
  • Master - Backup: We have acquired a machine to run as a 'live' backup to our master backend machine. What will happen is that we will replace the current master backend machine with the new hardware, and the current master backend machine will become the backup. The new box is an HP HP DL380 G6 with dual Quad Core X5550 Xeon CPUs, 32G of Ram and an external msa70 drive chassis.

  Again, a HUGE thanks goes out to Google and HP, with specific shout outs to Chris DiBona and Bdale Garbee for helping make this happen. It's been a long process to get this far, but the equipment is up, and it is proving its worth already!

• April 2, 2010: Would like to thank everyone for putting up with, and hopefully enjoying our little April Fools day joke this year. The commentary from various outlets seems to have been generally positive. If you're here and you didn't see it, a semi-permanent home for it will now be at http://userweb.kernel.org/~warthog9/april1/2010/.

  We now return you to your regularly scheduled kernel.org, already in progress.

• March 18, 2010: We would like to announce the general availability of SSL support for a number of the services on kernel.org! This should help provide an additional level of security, in particular for our dynamic content like the wiki's, patchwork and bugzilla.
  
  

  The certificates have been very graciously donated and signed by Thawte, and we at kernel.org greatly appreciate their support of Open Source! These signed certificates make it trivial for our users to make use of this additional layer of security, and alleviates a large amount of support effort that self-signed certificates would have incurred.
  
  

  "Thawte is proud of its open source lineage. Providing free certificates to community
  projects is just a small way of not only supporting the community but returning the favor.
  Please spread the word."
  
  

  Services that are now by default using SSL:

  • Bugzilla
  • Wikis
  • Account Requests
  • Patchwork

  Services that can optionally use SSL:

  • git.kernel.org
  • android.git.kernel.org
  • boot.kernel.org
  • www.kernel.org

  Services that DO NOT offer SSL*:

  • mirrors.kernel.org

  * This is because the load on the servers would be too great to adequately support the large amount of content offered there.

• March 18, 2010: Kernel.org would like to announce that we have, for the first time, been accepted to the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organization. You can find our page at http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2010/kernelorg , or you can find our idea's page at https://korg.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Gsoc2010:ideas.
  
  

  Our goal, as an organization, is to focus on work relating to the operation and mirroring infrastructure for kernel.org. We are looking into projects working on boot.kernel.org to new projects like the creation of a universal downloads statistics collector. At this time we don't have any Linux Kernel mentors or projects listed, however should a kernel developer have a specific project they would like to mentor, and putting it under kernel.org makes sense please contact ftpadmin or John 'Warthog9' Hawley, and we can discuss adding the project.
  
  

  Prospective students should join #kernel.org on irc.freenode.net to discuss projects, and to interact with the community, as well as investigate the projects page we have listed.
  
  

• September 21, 2009: We are proud to fully announce the opening and full availability of boot.kernel.org. boot.kernel.org is an internet based network bootable set of utilities, live images and network installers. It's intended to be a solid network bootable environment usable and for the masses.

• December 31, 2008: patchwork.kernel.org is now available for general use. It is currently only monitoring the Linux Kernel mailing-list, but should be useful to kernel developers in dealing with patches flying across the wire.

• September 19, 2008: mirrors.kernel.org has been flipped over to using our new GeoDNS based bind server (named-geodns). This means that, at the dns query level, our servers will attempt to direct you to the nearest / fastest kernel.org mirror for your request. This means that you no longer have to use mirrors.us.kernel.org or mirrors.eu.kernel.org to generally route you to the right place. This does mean a change to mirrors.kernel.org no longer explicitly pointing at mirrors.us.kernel.org. Additional information on named-geodns will be forth coming, check back here for an addendum soon.

• September 12, 2008: Thanks to a fundraising effort by the Linux Foundation, John "warthog9" Hawley will be joining kernel.org full time as administrator starting Monday, September 15. John has already been the primary administrator on a volunteer basis for the past three years, and will now be able to devote all his time toward kernel.org.
• 

  March 24, 2008: After far too long of a bringup, mirrors.eu.kernel.org is now available. Again thanks to to Hewlett-Packard, ISC and Umeå Universitet, we now have a full complement of mirror servers in Amsterdam and Umeå.

  Huge thanks to HP for donating two additional DL585 G5's for this effort, and huge thanks to ISC and UMU for volunteering to host our servers!

• Aug 17, 2007: We have been recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation.

• 

  Jun 30, 2007: European servers! Thanks to Hewlett-Packard, ISC and Umeå Universitet, we are introducing new kernel.org servers at ISC in Amsterdam and Umeå Universitet, Sweden. These servers are available as a round-robin as www.eu.kernel.org, ftp.eu.kernel.org, and rsync.eu.kernel.org.

  Additionally, the hostnames www.all.kernel.org, ftp.all.kernel.org, and rsync.all.kernel.org are worldwide round-robins among all four servers.

  We hope to have Geo- or BGP-based IP directing in the future, and hope to soon provide additional services in Europe.

  Huge thanks to HP for donating two additional DL380 G5's for this effort, and huge thanks to ISC and UMU for volunteering to host our servers!

• The bandwidth graphs have now moved here.

• May 20, 2007: New servers! We have received two new DL380 G5 servers from Hewlett-Packard. These servers are dual quad-core Xeon E5335 servers with 16 GB RAM per server, and 15000 RPM SAS disks. These servers have replaced the old servers for all local-contents services (www, ftp, and rsync); the old servers are now dedicated to running mirrors.kernel.org.

  Once again, thanks to HP for your continued support of kernel.org!

• Mar 13, 2007: 10 years of kernel.org! The Linux Kernel archives were announced to the world on March 13, 1997. Thanks to everyone that has made kernel.org possible over the years, our sponsors, staff volunteers and of course the Linux community for making it a worthwhile effort in the first place!
• Feb 4, 2006: Hewlett-Packard has been kind enough to replace our internal master server with a brand new ProLiant DL385 with a dual-core Opteron 275 and 4 GB of RAM. Once again, huge thanks to HP!
• Sep 30, 2005: By popular demand, there is now a kernel.org FAQ.
• Aug 21, 2003: Please don't use finger.kernel.org for any sort of automatic monitoring. The number of automatic bots hitting this port is causing the finger daemon to shut down more often than not. The same information is available from http://www.kernel.org/kdist/finger_banner.

The Linux Kernel Archives Mirror System

To improve access for everyone, a number of sites around the world have provided mirrors of this site, which may be faster to use than the master archive itself. Please see http://www.kernel.org/mirrors/ for information about how to connect to a participating mirror site.

To guard against Trojan mirror sites, all files originating at the Linux Kernel Archives are cryptographically signed. If you are getting a message that the verification key has expired, please see this link.

What is Linux?

Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.

It has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix, including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management, and multistack networking including IPv4 and IPv6.

Although originally developed first for 32-bit x86-based PCs (386 or higher), today Linux also runs on (at least) the Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, ARM, Hitachi SuperH, IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, AMD x86-64, AXIS CRIS, Renesas M32R, Atmel AVR32, Renesas H8/300, NEC V850, Tensilica Xtensa, and Analog Devices Blackfin architectures; for many of these architectures in both 32- and 64-bit variants.

Linux is easily portable to most general-purpose 32- or 64-bit architectures as long as they have a paged memory management unit (PMMU) and a port of the GNU C compiler (gcc) (part of The GNU Compiler Collection, GCC). Linux has also been ported to a number of architectures without a PMMU, although functionality is then obviously somewhat limited. See the µClinux project for more info.

New to Linux?

If you're new to Linux, you don't want to download the kernel, which is just a component in a working Linux system. Instead, you want what is called a distribution of Linux, which is a complete Linux system. There are numerous distributions available for download on the Internet as well as for purchase from various vendors; some are general-purpose, and some are optimized for specific uses. We currently have mirrors of several distributions available at mirrors.kernel.org, as well as a small collection of special-purpose distributions at http://www.kernel.org/pub/dist/.

Note, however, that most distributions are very large (several gigabytes), so unless you have a fast Internet link you may want to save yourself some hassle and purchase a CD-ROM with a distribution; such CD-ROMs are available from a number of vendors.

The Linux Installation HOWTO has more information how to set up your first Linux system.

More Information

There is much information about Linux on the web.

Reporting Linux Kernel bugs

Please see http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/reporting-bugs.html if you want to report a Linux kernel bug. Bug reports sent to the kernel.org administrators will be ignored.

There is now a bugzilla setup at bugzilla.kernel.org. Currently this is for reporting kernel version 2.6 bugs only.

Mailing list

The Linux kernel is discussed on the linux-kernel mailing list at vger.kernel.org. The FAQ is available at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/, please read the FAQ before subscribing.

Although there is no official archive site, unofficial archives of the list can be found at:

• http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel
• http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/

Development trees

The Linux kernel, as well as several other pieces of software, are maintained using the git source code control system.

See http://git.kernel.org/ for a list of git repositories on kernel.org.

Cryptographic Software

Due to U.S. Exports Regulations, all cryptographic software on this site is subject to the following legal notice:

This site includes publicly available encryption source code which, together with object code resulting from the compiling of publicly available source code, may be exported from the United States under License Exception "TSU" pursuant to 15 C.F.R. Section 740.13(e).

This legal notice applies to cryptographic software only. Please see the Bureau of Industry and Security for more information about current U.S. regulations.

Our servers are located in Corvallis, Oregon, USA; Palo Alto and San Francisco, California, USA; Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Umeå, Sweden. Use in violation of any applicable laws is prohibited.

Comments

Before emailing kernel.org, please take a look at our kernel.org FAQ.

For comments about the web pages, please send mail to webmaster@kernel.org.

For comments about the file archive, please send mail to ftpadmin@kernel.org.

Please do not send general Linux questions or bug reports to these addresses. We do not have the resources to reply to them. If your message does not relate to the operation of the Linux Kernel Archives, it will be deleted without action. Because of the volume of unsolicited email we receive, please add [KORG] to the subject to avoid accidental deletion. Additionally, any Content-Type other than text/plain will most likely be deleted without action.

This site is operated by the Linux Kernel Organization, Inc., a 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation, with support from the following sponsors.

Linux is a Registered Trademark of Linus Torvalds.
(Legal Notice)