Torvalds dared critics to fork Linux, and someone did
▼ Summary
– A student at Beihang University created linux-0.11-rs, a Rust reimplementation of the Linux 0.11 kernel from December 1991.
– The project is a rewrite of an early kernel, not a true fork or port, and is larger than the original, with about 47,000 lines of Rust code.
– The Rust kernel includes utilities, libraries, and programs beyond just the core OS, making it more complete than the original kernel alone.
– The student credited a Rust OS kernel tutorial, suggesting human effort was involved despite AI assistance in the project.
– Commenters on Hacker News criticized the project as a waste of resources, but the article views it as a learning exercise and harmless experimentation.
Earlier this week, Linux creator Linus Torvalds told critics of his stance on AI to “fork off,” inviting anyone who disagreed with his remarks to create their own version of the kernel. Now, someone has answered that call,sort of. Enter linux-0.11-rs, a complete reimplementation of the Linux kernel written in the increasingly popular Rust programming language.
This project isn’t a direct response to Torvalds’ challenge. For one thing, it appears to have been generated with AI assistance, but the timing made the connection too tempting to ignore. The work comes from a Beihang University undergraduate in Beijing, China, who goes by the handle Poseidon.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t a fork or even a port of modern Linux. It’s a rewrite of a very early version,specifically, Linux kernel 0.11. That kernel dates back to December 8, 1991, just months after the initial 0.01 release. Version 0.11 was the last kernel of Linux’s first year, followed by 0.12 in January 1992 and a jump to 0.95 in March as Torvalds aimed for the 1.0 milestone, which arrived two years later.
In the original 0.11 release notes, 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 added, “This is a major milestone, since it makes the kernel much more powerful than Minix was at the time,” and noted that “Ted Ts’o shows up as a coder.”
Poseidon’s Rust rewrite is significantly larger than the original. Hacker News users have been analyzing it closely. One user, “dminik,” ran it through an automatic code analyzer, while another, “Pajecawav’s Ghloc,” estimated it at just over 47,000 lines of Rust. Dminik broke it down further: “It’s about 15k lines of code for the kernel and the rest is various utilities, libraries and programs that can run on the kernel.”
So linux-0.11-rs includes more than just the kernel,it bundles the full operating system as it existed at the end of 1991. Poseidon also credits a tutorial on writing an OS kernel in Rust, suggesting this wasn’t a purely bot-driven effort. Some Hacker News commentators dismissed it as a waste of tokens or even a waste of water and electricity, but it looks like a student having fun, experimenting, and learning. That’s something worth celebrating.
The Reg FOSS desk isn’t a fan of bot-generated slop, but we fully support exploration, learning, and play. As long as code-generating LLMs remain cheap and accessible, it will be hard to stop young people and students from tinkering with them. Nobody will ever deploy anything on a bot-generated rewrite of a 35-year-old prototype kernel,and remember, the original was itself written by a 22-year-old who did it “Just for Fun.”
(Source: Theregister.com)