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Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

I thought of a fun exercise: Take the original Linux kernel, study it and slowly build upon it without looking at the current Linux kernel.

My thinking is that it could be quite interesting to see how different people evolve the kernel - maybe some interesting ideas result.

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I've always wondered what Torvalds's answer would be if you asked him if he had the chance to snap his fingers and have the kernel rewritten from scratch what he would change?

Add an 'e' to the creat() call?

Not much scope for that, it's POSIX (and Ken Thompson's "fault" https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8390979/)

Whatever it is, I hope the answer involves “implement kevent(2) instead of creating epoll(2)”.

That sounds fun, but a very bad use of time.

Linus' monolithic kernel won out over Tanenbaum's microkernel, because it just worked. In the 1990s that was important.

Now we want it to work and not get totally pwned because we opened a sketchy email attachment before we had our coffee. Tanenbaum was right [1], but for the wrong reasons, and way too early.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...

Where would one find the original kernel?

http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/Linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar...

This repo claims to have the original: https://github.com/zavg/linux-0.01

This tarball seems to include the original kernel sources: http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar...

The release notes for 0.01 are here: http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/R...

Seems like a waste of time.

Like if you want to have a look at a different kernel designed recently:

https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts

I wouldn't consider it a waste, the changes and history behind those changes to the design seem interesting to me.

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