Linux kernel

The Linux kernel is a free and open source Unix-like kernel that Linus Torvalds first released in 1991 while a student in Finland, initially describing it as a hobby project for 386/486 AT clone computers. It is monolithic in its basic design, running the whole operating system in kernel space, but built in a modular way so that individual components can be loaded and unloaded while the system runs. The kernel is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, and the GNU Project adopted it to complete its own free Unix-like operating system. Since the late 1990s it has formed the base of many operating system distributions, and in modified form it also underlies Android, which accounts for most of the world's mobile devices; all of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world run on Linux. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/